Click counter when link is clicked PHP/JS

Question

Click counter when link is clicked PHP/JS

9.7k Views Asked by user3727784 At 04 April 2025 at 01:30

I have a little script here that counts clicks when link is clicked and stores it in .txt file, but it works fine when I have only "click=yes" under href. But I can't make it to track clicks when I have link to external site.

Here is my code:

<?php
if(!file_exists('counter.txt')){
file_put_contents('counter.txt', '0');
}
if($_GET['click'] == 'yes'){
file_put_contents('counter.txt', ((int) file_get_contents('counter.txt')) + 1);
header('Location: ' . $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME']);
die;
}
?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>counter example</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1><?php echo file_get_contents('counter.txt'); ?></h1>
<a href="http://www.google.com?click=yes" target="new">clickMe</a>
</body>
</html>

My guess is it has to do something with header('Location: ' . $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME']); but I can't figure it out so I could really use some help.

And is it somehow possible to have multiple links save to the same file, and when I show it on website it's sorted from largest number to smallest? I have an idea how to do it with MySQL database but I can't use it at place where this will be implemented.

Thanks in advance! Cheers!

Original Q&A

There are 3 best solutions below

MadsRH On 04 March 2022 at 19:33

I love the simple solution by Paul S., but if you want to track the clicks with date, you can do something like this:

03/03/2022 14
04/03/2022 2

    <?php
$dateexists = false;

if(!file_exists('counter.txt'))
    { $fh = fopen('counter.txt', 'w');
      fclose($fh); }

$datecounts = file('counter.txt', FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES);
foreach($datecounts as $key => $datecount){

list($date, $count) = explode("\t", $datecount);

$count = (int) $count;
if($date == date('d/m/Y'))
{   $datecounts[$key] = $date."\t".++$count;
    $dateexists = true; }
}
if(!$dateexists)
    { $datecounts[] = date('d/m/Y')."\t1"; }

$fh = fopen('counter.txt', 'w');
if (flock($fh, LOCK_EX)) {
    foreach($datecounts as $datecount)
    { fwrite($fh, $datecount.PHP_EOL); }
flock($fh, LOCK_UN);
}

else
{ //couldn't lock, might want to do stuff here }

fclose($fh);
header('Location: ' . $_GET['href']); // the redirect
?>

BojanT On 28 September 2014 at 17:35

You could use Javascript to catch click on a link , send data via AJAX call. Here is small sample using JQuery.

<html>
    <head>
        <script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
        <script>
            $(
                    function() {
                        $('a').click(linkClicked);
                    }
            );
            //this funciton will be called on every click on any link on page
            function linkClicked() {
                var url = $(this).attr('href');
                //call PHP script to save URL ./saveurlclicks.php?url=CLICKEDURL
                $.get('./saveurlclicks.php', {'url': url})
                //be sure to return true so user can navigate further
                return true;
            }
        </script>
    </head>
    <body>
        <a href='/some href' >asasa</a>

        <a href="www.google.com" >google</a>
    </body>
</html>

<?php
//saveurlclicks.php
// here we save links in file but using serialized array
// if you need to get count of links clicked , 
// have a second script that unserializes array and sort it in revers order 
$url = @$_GET['url'];
$counterFile = 'counter.ser';
if ($url) {
    if(file_exist($filename))
    $links = unserialize(file_get_contents($filename));
    else $links=array();

    if (!isset($links[$url])) {
        $links[$url] = 0;
    }
    $links[$url] ++;
    file_put_contents($counterFile, serialize($links));
}

**Paul S.** · Accepted Answer

Your server never sees the URI being accessed as the client leaves your page. To do something like this, it may be best to set up a redirect which works like this

<a href="/goto.php?href=http://www.google.com" target="_blank">click me</a>

(Make sure the external site's URL is URL encoded as you're passing it as a GET component of a URL to your own page)

Then in goto.php you store your click and send a redirect header

if(!file_exists('counter.txt')){
    file_put_contents('counter.txt', '0');
}
file_put_contents('counter.txt', ((int) file_get_contents('counter.txt')) + 1);
header('Location: ' . $_GET['href']);

Now you can track these clicks, you can add your domain-specific counters in goto.php instead of your text file

Click counter when link is clicked PHP/JS

There are 3 best solutions below

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