One snippet, pasted into Layout → Add a Gadget → HTML/JavaScript, in the footer area — because an all-time total is a footer artefact — nobody scrolls up to check it. Blogger still hosts millions of blogs on blogspot and custom domains, and almost none of those sites want another gadget just to render a small piece of live data. Nothing to install. Blogger's own HTML/JavaScript gadget takes raw markup, which is all this needs — and unlike a theme edit, a gadget survives changing your theme.
The free hit counter is back — yes, it's still free. The classic Geocities visitor counter from 1996, rebuilt with a tamper-proof MutationObserver, server-side bot filter, and 6 themes from LED-pixel nostalgia to minimal-modern flat. Drop the snippet on any HTML page and the count is live in 30 seconds.
Blogger themes are parsed as XML, so characters like &, <, > and quotes inside a script can trigger errors such as "The reference to entity must end with the ';' delimiter" and refuse to save. Our snippet is a plain async script tag with no bare ampersands, so it pastes cleanly — but if you ever hit that error, wrap the code in //<![CDATA[ ... //]]> or encode the five reserved characters. This is the main reason to prefer a gadget over a theme edit.
The post editor has two modes. Compose escapes anything that looks like markup, so the snippet renders as visible text instead of a widget. Switch to HTML view before pasting, and avoid flipping back to Compose afterwards — Blogger sometimes rewrites the markup when it converts between the two.
Changing theme, restoring a backup or applying one of Blogger's own themes replaces the whole template, taking any code you pasted into it with it. Gadgets live in your layout settings instead, so they survive. Unless you specifically need the <head> position, use a gadget.
Nothing to install. Blogger's own HTML/JavaScript gadget takes raw markup, which is all this needs — and unlike a theme edit, a gadget survives changing your theme. Installing a gadget for this would mean an extra dependency, an update cycle and a security surface to render one snippet. Paste it into Layout → Add a Gadget → HTML/JavaScript, in the footer area and you're done.
Layout → Add a Gadget → HTML/JavaScript, in the footer area — because an all-time total is a footer artefact — nobody scrolls up to check it. Open Layout in the Blogger dashboard — it shows your theme as drag-and-drop boxes. Find a footer box and click Add a Gadget, then pick HTML/JavaScript from the list. Paste the snippet into the Content box, leave the title blank if you don't want a heading, and Save. Drag the gadget's position if needed, then click Save arrangement. It appears on every page.
No. The script tag is async, so it never blocks your page from rendering, and the widget draws itself after your content is already on screen. Blogger is served by Google's own infrastructure and the snippet is one async tag, so it loads after your post is already on screen. There's no cache to purge — saving a gadget publishes it immediately.
Layout editor: Add a Gadget → HTML/JavaScript. Theme editor: Edit HTML, paste above </head> or </body>. Post editor: switch to HTML view, then paste. Blogger mobile app: not supported — use the desktop dashboard. Any builder with a raw-HTML or code block will render it, because there's nothing framework-specific in the snippet.