How do I stop the 'view-counter' from counting after the first visit? Every time I refresh the page on the same listing , it counts it as a new visit.
It is counting how many times the page is visited.
For a more detailed review, add Google Analitics.
I recommend Matomo if you really want to get rid of Google :) https://matomo.org/ (former Piwik) free and open source
Currently, there is no possibility to count only the first visit. That is another type of statistics, it is a visitor one.