Stats Block Countdown

How the Stats block works on your homepage. The two big numbers are yours to type, and the countdown automatically targets your soonest ending competition.

The Stats block on your homepage has two parts that work in very different ways, and it is easy to assume you control both. In reality:

The two big numbers (for example "Total Winners" and "Total Paid Out") are text you type in yourself. They never update on their own.
The "Next Competition" countdown is fully automatic. You cannot hand-pick which competition it points at. It always counts down to whichever live competition ends soonest.

Here is what that means in practice.

The two stats are manual text

When you edit the Stats block, you will see fields for a title and a value, and a second title and value. Both the label and the number are free text. You type whatever you want, such as "Total Paid Out" and "£250,000".

These numbers do not update automatically. They will sit at whatever you last typed until you edit them again. If you advertise a figure here, make a habit of updating it yourself so it stays accurate and trustworthy.

If you would rather show figures that update on their own, the Winners Display block is built for showing real past winners, and the Instant Winners Counter keeps its own running total. See Set Up Your Homepage for the full list of blocks.

How the countdown picks a competition

The "Next Competition" countdown chooses its target for you. It looks across all of your competitions and picks the one that:

Is currently live (switched on, past its start date, not yet past its end date, and not sold out), and
Is publicly listed (so any hidden or VIP competition is left out).

From those, it targets the one with the soonest end date. That is the competition the clock ticks down to.

The countdown ignores your homepage layout completely. It does not care what is in your slider or what you have marked as featured. It simply finds the live, listed competition that ends next. That is why the countdown can sometimes point at a competition you are not promoting heavily on the page.

Why the countdown might point somewhere unexpected

If the countdown is showing a competition you did not expect, the answer is almost always that another live competition has an earlier end date. A few things are worth knowing:

Hidden and VIP competitions are never used. Even if one of them ends sooner, the countdown skips it because it is not publicly listed. You can read more in Hidden VIP Competitions.
Sold-out and already-ended competitions are skipped too. The clock only considers competitions that are still open to enter.
Your only lever is the end date. If you want the countdown to track a particular competition, that competition needs to be the soonest-ending live, listed one. Adjusting end dates is the way to influence it.

A brief odd reading after a competition ends is normal

Just after the soonest competition closes, the countdown can look wrong for a short while. It might keep naming the competition that just finished, or show strange or negative-looking numbers, because it is still pointing at a moment that has already passed.

This is expected and there is nothing to fix. The countdown remembers its target for a short period (up to about an hour) rather than recalculating on every page view, so there is a brief window where it can lag behind. Once it refreshes, it automatically re-picks the next soonest-ending live competition and looks correct again. It self-corrects, so you can leave it be.

Quick recap

The two big stats are text you type. Update them yourself to keep them accurate.
The countdown auto-targets the soonest-ending live, publicly listed competition. You cannot hand-pick it.
Hidden, sold-out, and ended competitions are never the target.
To steer the countdown, change end dates.
An odd reading right after a competition closes is temporary and clears itself within about an hour.

Last updated 1 month ago