The short answer — the Summary shows your last scan
The Linkilo → Summary page is not a live feed. Its cards and charts are built from the latest completed scan of your content. If you've added or removed links since that scan, the numbers won't move until Linkilo scans again.
Two buttons at the top of the Summary do different things:
- Perform Scan — re-reads every post and rebuilds Linkilo's link records from your current content. This is the button that makes the numbers change. A progress panel shows the stage, how many items have been processed, the percentage and elapsed time; you can stop it and reload. If a request takes too long or three batches in a row make no progress, the scan stops and tells you instead of spinning forever.
- Refresh Dashboard — recalculates the cards and charts from the last completed scan. It does not rescan or clear anything. Use it when the page looks out of sync with itself (for example a chart that didn't load); it won't pick up links you added after the scan.
So: added links today and want to see them in the Summary? Click Perform Scan, wait for it to finish, and the cards update.
Why the growth charts start recently
Link Growth Over Time and the other history charts store one point per day, for up to 180 days. Linkilo 3.0 records a point whenever the Summary is opened on a day that has none, and again during its daily background maintenance. Linkilo 2.9 never kept this history, so after upgrading the chart starts on upgrade day and fills in from there — it cannot show the months before.
Why a chart might be empty
- "Loading chart data…" — the chart is still fetching. If it stays, the page tells you the data is taking longer than expected and suggests reloading or running Perform Scan.
- "No … data yet. Run Perform Scan to refresh this report." — Linkilo has nothing recorded for that chart. Run the scan.
- A diagnostic line such as "No per-page link data: links table 0 rows, Summary snapshot 0 pages, per-post counts 0 … Click Refresh Dashboard, then Perform Scan if it stays empty." — this appears on Top Pages and Average Links Per Post Type when all three of Linkilo's data sources are empty. It names each source so support can see exactly what's missing. Follow the instruction in the line; if it still shows zeros after a completed scan, send that exact text to support.
After upgrading from 2.9, running Perform Scan once is worth doing anyway: Orphan Pages, Link Priorities and the Add URLs list all read the links table, and only a scan rebuilds it.
If the numbers still look stale — caching
Once a scan has finished, the remaining culprit is usually a cache layer between Linkilo and your browser:
- Your hosting provider's server-side cache
- Your CDN (Cloudflare, BunnyCDN, KeyCDN, etc.)
- Your WordPress caching plugin (WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, LiteSpeed Cache, etc.)
- Your browser's local cache
1. Clear cache
Clear the cache in your caching plugin's dashboard ("Clear all cache"), your CDN (Cloudflare dashboard → Caching → Purge Everything), your hosting panel if your host has server-level cache, and your browser. See How to clear your cache in WordPress for our detailed walkthrough.
2. Use incognito mode
Opening wp-admin in an incognito window bypasses your browser cache entirely. If the data looks current in incognito but stale in your regular window, browser cache was the culprit.
When to dig deeper
If the data is still stale after a completed Perform Scan, a Refresh Dashboard, and clearing every cache layer, open a support ticket with:
- A screenshot of the stale data
- The expected vs actual numbers
- The exact text of any diagnostic line shown in an empty chart
- Your hosting provider name
We'll investigate.
Last reviewed for Linkilo 3.0.0 (October 2026).