Displaying the most viewed posts becomes very helpful for every user to have a look at trendy blog post in your WordPress.

There are so many plugins that will help us easily to add most viewed/poipular posts in our WordPress website. But there is an easy way we can add popular posts by adding few lines of code.

We can use post meta for storing the number of  post views count. Using the stored Meta value, we will fetch the posts according to the post visits/views.

For doing this, we only have to add few lines of code in WordPress theme's function.php and single.php file.

In function.php you can add the following code.

function setPostViews($postID) {
    $countKey = 'post_views_count';
    $count = get_post_meta($postID, $countKey, true);
    if($count==''){
        $count = 0;
        delete_post_meta($postID, $countKey);
        add_post_meta($postID, $countKey, '0');
    }else{
        $count++;
        update_post_meta($postID, $countKey, $count);
    }
}

In single.php , just copy this 1 line of code .Single.php file in WordPress is the file for displaying WordPress blog posts

setPostViews(get_the_ID());

After adding these lines of code, you can display popular wordpress post in any place in your WordPress blog by adding few lines of code for display.

You can add this code anywhere in your pages,where you want to display the posts.

<?php
query_posts('meta_key=post_views_count&orderby=meta_value_num&order=DESC');
if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post();
?>
    <li><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
<?php
endwhile; endif;
wp_reset_query();
?>