How to Add an Animated Counter To Your WordPress Site That Uses A Different Database

With WP Business Intelligence Pro you can now add animated counters (as of Version 3.2.5). These counters can pull data from your independent database (i.e. not your WordPress database) and display them on your website anywhere you want with a shortcode.

Animated Counters work a lot like our Charts, Graphs, and Tables meaning that you can define a database query and then build your counter and give it some parameters before generating the shortcode to add across your website.

Here’s How To Add an Animated Counter Using Your Own Database With WordPress

Step 1. – Define what figure you want to show in your counter.

This is usually the easy part, you probably already know what number you want to display on your website, in a blogpost, on a page, or in your dashboard.

Step 2. – Place the data for your animated counter inside of a database.

WP Business Intelligence Pro supports MySQL, MariaDB, MS SQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, IBM Informix, Firebird, and SQLite databases.

Choose your database and get your data added to it.

Step 3. – Create a connection to your database

In WP Business INtelligence Pro go to the “Data Sources” page and then click on “Create” under Data Connections. This will take you to listing of your existing database connections along with a button at the top that says “add new”. Click that button and it will take you to a page to setup your new database connection.

Here you can easily setup the connection to your database including

Step 4. – Create a database query

In WP Business Intelligence Pro go to the “Queries” page and click on the “Add New” button at the top of the page.

Write your database query here and save it.

Note: The animated counter only displays one figure, so make sure your database query selects one final figure from the database to display. Or, alternatively know that a general query such as “select” will display the most recent numerical figure in the counter.

Step 5. – Add your animated counter to your site

Now that you have generated your animated counter you can place it anywhere on your site by pasting the shortcode. You can do this using the classic text editor, any page builder, or even the Gutenberg block system.