Apostrophe theme – Auto refresh of front page
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I’ve been using Apostrophe for nearly 12 months but from when I started using the theme it appears to inflate artificially the number of page views. Since my views of the home page have mushroomed I think it’s because the front page refreshes itself so quickly so that if anyone visits the home page they will generate an extra page view for every refresh.
Is there a way within the theme to stop this auto refresh? I’ve looked but can’t see how to do it.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi,
First, WordPress.com sites do not have auto refreshing pages or posts. You may use a browser add-on or an app that causes a page to refresh when you’re visiting your site, but the behavior caused by the add-on or app will not affect the experience of other visitors using different devices to visit your site.
Since my views of the home page have mushroomed…
Are you, by chance, referring to an unexpectedly high number of “Home page / Archives” views in your statistics?
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If I visit the site https://manicpopthrills.wordpress.com/ and stay there for days without manually reloading the page, it will not refresh at all, even if you add something to it.
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Are you, by chance, referring to an unexpectedly high number of “Home page / Archives” views in your statistics?
Yep. It started as soon as I changed the theme and there are spikes periodically within hours when there seems to have been a high number of home page views and nothing else. The average page views per visitor is significantly higher under Apostrophe than previously.
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The Home page / Archives statistic does not represent views of the home page alone. It also includes views of all archives pages, a group consisting of category, tag, author, periodic (year, month, date) archives and others. Because all of these are combined in a single statistic, it’s not possible through WordPress.com stats to determine how many, if any, of the views reported represent views of the home page alone.
The reasoning behind the name given to this particular stat, and a brief description of what it consists of, can be found in the forum topic My stats, of April 2012. Based upon my reading of that topic, I’ve provided an explanation of what the stat represents in the July 2015 topic where is my homepage / archives?
The Apostrophe theme might be a factor in the increase, though it’s highly likely that the categories and archives widgets in the site’s sidebar widget area, which could be included on the front page of most if not all themes, is a large contributing factor.
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there are spikes periodically within hours when there seems to have been a high number of home page views and nothing else.
Is your analysis based upon WordPress.com stats alone, or have you been using another stats counting service that would allow you to isolate the page views of the front page (home page) alone?
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The Apostrophe theme might be a factor in the increase, though it’s highly likely that the categories and archives widgets in the site’s sidebar widget area, which could be included on the front page of most if not all themes, is a large contributing factor.
I’d agree that this would be a likely factor as well.
The placement/visibility of these widgets under Apostrphe is different, and possible getting more attention than on other themes. You could experiment by temporarily removing the widgets for a few days to see what impact that has on stats if you’d like.
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Thanks for the replies.
The stats are based entirely on the WP stats. My suspicion that there’s some sort of refresh going on is that a) there are distinct spikes on the hourly indicator, and b) my Android mobile keeps loading stories ad nauseam.
My “stats” increased noticeably (and these spikes started too) as soon as I changed to Apostrophe. Over 2016 the average number of pages viewed per visitor also went up significantly from around 1.5 to 2.2 per visitor.
I’ll have a look at the widgets tomorrow although I may try changing the theme as a test.
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Just tried a little experiment – I “parked” the Android mobile on the home page and it kept loading stories. 131 views (or thereby) in 10 minutes – that’s very atypical for the blog. Average views per visitor today is more than 5.
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Can you tell us a little more about what you mean when you say it kept loading stories? I’ve just loaded the page on my own android device and nothing out of the ordinary happened.
Is the page refreshing/reloading itself? If so, you might want to repeat this test in a different mobile browser, and/or on a different mobile device.
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