One of our maintenance clients came to us with a little challenge and asked us to recommend a plugin that counts downloads of PDF files they make available to their customers.

Added this she wanted to know which individual logged in users also downloaded the file.

This type of detailed knowledge of what people are doing with your downloads is important in many ways, how are clients using your information?  Is it useful enough that people even want to download it.

We went on a search and found Download Monitor to fit the bill.

What Is Download Monitor

It’s a plugin that lets you create a series of downloadable files in the backend of WordPress.

It controls who can download them, any user or logged in users.

It creates a shortcode so you can embed those files in posts or pages

Finally any most importantly it allows us to log and record downloads as a total per file and by user.

Adding A File

Adding a download file is much like creating a new blog post, give it a title, add some descriptive text about the file to be displayed.

Then you upload the actual media file.

Once added you can set various options for the file, one very useful one is to restrict logged in users to download only.

Embedding A File / Download Links

The file to be downloaded can be added as a shortcode into a post or page  as an example.

[download id="11347"]

Or you can send out a special download link to the file rather than a direct link so downloads can be recorded, here is an example of this.

https://neilmatthews.com/download/11347/ (don’t click the plugin has been deactivated)

Logs

This was the main feature my client needed, a log of who had downloaded a file.  We can see a log of total downloads or we can see a list of individual downloads by user

All of this data can be downloaded as a CSV file for deeper analysis.

Wrap Up

If you want insights into what is being downloaded by your site visitors or logged in customers Download Monitor is the best out there.  We tested about 12 other plugins and this came out tops for reporting.  Many can create the total download number but none gave us per user logs.

One of the services we offer to our maintenance clients is a plugin finding and testing service, why not give us a go.

Photo Credit: 5500km via Compfight cc