Ultimeter comes with a function to refresh your meter dynamically, rather than each time the page is refreshed. This means you can leave your Ultimeter displayed and it will update in the background, to reflect changes in the progress.

To enable real-time updates for a meter, head to the Ultimeter you wish to control, then the Visual Options tab in the menu. Then, toggle real-time updating on or off as required.

Your meter will only visually change if it detects a change in the data. This feature is designed to prevent distraction to those viewing the meter, especially where there are multiple meters per page.

Infinite Flip meters are currently unsupported

Performance Considerations #

Any automated task a website is required to make can be resource intensive. This means that each Ultimeter that is updating in real-time will use server resources. If you experience performance loss, we urge you to check whether your web hosting environment is sufficient. Multiple Ultimeters, all updating in real-time, every 10 seconds, are likely to cause a performance loss in some very low-cost, shared hosting environments.

However, we have added some ‘smart’ functionality to keep your site running as fast as possible.

Per-Meter Updates #

Each meter can have real-time updating switched on or off. Head to the Ultimeter you wish to control, then the Visual Options tab in the menu. Then, toggle real-time updating on or off as required.

Update Interval #

We have found that 60 seconds is the best interval between each refresh. We do not recommend setting this interval lower than this, as you may see performance loss. If you wish to change this, please use the following filter:

apply_filters( 'ultimeter_refresh', $interval_in_milliseconds );

The interval should be given in milliseconds, so to set the interval to be 30 seconds, cut and paste the following into your functions.php file:

add_filter( 'ultimeter_refresh', function() {
  return 30000;
});

Disable Real-time Updates Globally #

Real-time updates are enabled on a per-meter basis. It is therefore unlikely that you will need to disable real-time updates globally. However, there may be some cases where multiple people may be able to create meters, and therefore the site administrator may wish to remove the ability for these users to enable the function. To disable real-time updates, use the following filter:

apply_filters( 'ultimeter_refresh_global_enable', $boolean )