Recently Viewed (VX)

Shows visitors the posts they've looked at recently — a low-effort way to help people get back to a listing they saw earlier.

Tracking works for everyone: logged-in users have their history stored in user meta, so it follows them across devices, while guests are tracked in localStorage in their own browser.

Enable it under Voxel Toolkit → Widgets.

Guest history is per-browser

A guest's list lives in their browser only. It won't survive clearing site data, and doesn't carry to another device. If someone logs in later, treat the two histories as separate.

Content

Control	Purpose
Title	Heading above the list
Title HTML Tag	Which heading level to render
Post Type	Which Voxel post type to track and show
Max Posts	How many recent posts to display
Layout	Grid, or a horizontal slider with navigation arrows
Columns	Grid columns — responsive, and ignored in slider layout
Gap	Spacing between cards
Show Clear Link	Let the visitor clear their own history
Clear Link Text	Label for that link

Keep Max Posts small

Four to six is usually right. This is a convenience shortcut, not a browsing interface — a long list competes with your actual search and takes over the page.

Show Clear Link is worth enabling. It's a small privacy courtesy on a shared or public computer, and it costs nothing.

Where to place it

• A sidebar or footer on archive and single-post templates, where it's useful without being intrusive
• The account dashboard, as a "pick up where you left off" section
• Not the homepage for first-time visitors — it renders empty until someone has viewed something

Styling

Elementor style sections for the header (bottom spacing, vertical alignment), the title's colour, typography and margin, the clear link across normal and hover, and the empty-state message.

Slider Navigation

Choosing the Slider layout adds a Slider Navigation section for the arrows either side of the strip. It only appears when the layout is set to Slider.

Control	Purpose
Button size	Width and height of the round button
Arrow size	Size of the chevron inside it
Distance from edge	Negative values sit the buttons outside the strip, positive values overlap the cards
Border radius	Corner rounding — drop it to 0 for square buttons
Normal / Hover	Arrow colour, background, border and shadow for each state

Tooltips at the very edge of a slider

Cards no longer clip their own tooltips, but a slider is a horizontal scroller and has to hide what falls outside it — so a tooltip on the last visible card can still be trimmed at the strip's edge. Grid layout has no such limit.

Hiding it when there's nothing to show

Two visibility rules are registered into Voxel's normal Visibility UI:

• Recently viewed is empty
• Recently viewed is not empty

Apply either to the widget, a heading beside it, or the whole container, so a first-time visitor doesn't see an empty section. Each rule carries its own post type list, so it can be scoped to the same types the widget shows.

Logged-in visitors only

The rules are evaluated on the server, and a logged-out visitor's history lives only in their browser. For those visitors the rules always read as empty. The widget itself still renders their history client-side.

Alternatively, set No results text in the Style tab to show a message instead. Clear the field to show nothing at all.

Troubleshooting

The widget is empty

Expected until the visitor has viewed a post of the selected type. Test by visiting a couple of posts, then returning to the page with the widget.

It stays empty after viewing posts

• Confirm Post Type matches the posts being viewed — it tracks one type
• For guests, confirm the browser allows localStorage; private windows and strict privacy settings can block it
• Confirm a page cache isn't serving a cached copy of the widget to every visitor

History doesn't follow a user between devices

Only logged-in users get cross-device history, via user meta. Anything viewed while logged out stays in that browser.

Cleared history comes back

Clearing removes the stored list, but viewing posts again rebuilds it — that's the intended behaviour, not a bug.