How to display your customer reviews on WordPress?

I don’t know about you, but when I make a major purchase, such as a new phone, computer or sofa, I don’t choose my product lightly, on a crush.

I spend time comparing offers and prices. The choices are so wide that I could spend hours hesitating, benchmarking without ever making a decision.

Fortunately, we have invented something very practical for hesitant buyers: customer reviews!

According to a study, nearly 70% of online shoppers usually browse between one and six customer reviews before making a purchasing decision. Less than one in ten shoppers are not used to reading customer reviews before buying.

To boost your reputation and your revenue – among others – , consider posting satisfied customer reviews on your site.

Originally written in October 2019, this article was last updated in April 2022.

Why post customer reviews on your site?

Reason 1: Customer reviews will help you sell

To know if your site is reliable, if your products or services are of high quality, your customers’ opinions and testimonials are the most effective.

In psychology, this is called the “social proof” mechanism. According to this principle, an individual who does not know what to think will tend to rely on the opinions of others.

If a person hesitates between two restaurants, two plumbers, or two software programs, he or she will rely on the one with the most positive opinions, or the one with the most convincing customer opinions. If he is satisfied and motivated, he too will leave a positive testimony: this is the virtuous circle of social proof!

Let’s take an example: on the sales page of the Neve theme, one of the first elements we see, well before the list of features of this theme, is a testimony.

Customer reviews and testimonials therefore make it possible to:

• Give trust in your products or services.
• Improve your credibility.
• Optimize conversions on your site.
• And therefore improve your sales.

So why go without them?

Reason 2: Customer reviews are good for your SEO

Customer reviews help better convince buyers once they are on your website, but it is not their only asset.

They can even help you attract more traffic to your site by improving your SEO.

How? Thanks to the “rich snippets”. This is additional information that appears for some sites in Google search results.

Have you ever seen these little stars that sometimes appear?

In the above example, you can see that the store has an average score of 4.4 out of 5 based on more than 2,800 reviews. If you have a choice between this store and another with a score of 2 out of 5, or no score at all, your choice is easy, right?

These “rich snippets” are not only useful in ecommerce. You will also find them on cooking recipes, products, events and even FAQs!

Let’s say I’m looking for advice on choosing my new scooter.

Here are the results sent by Google:

The scooter buying guide proposed by Envyride is not the first one displayed in the list, but it has a score of 7,7 out of 10. My eyes will be drawn to the stars, and I will trust the readers who have found this guide to be of high quality. So I will trust him.

Reason 3: Customer reviews are valuable information

Customer reviews are a gold mine.

They allow you to understand what your customers like and dislike about your site, your products or services, your company. They provide you with valuable feedback that will help you continuously improve.

Some companies make customer reviews a key element of their strategy, such as Amazon. As explained in this article, the famous e-retail empire has committed to “help customers make purchase decisions” and developed surveys acting as a critical tool for understanding the customer experience on the platform.

Giving your customers a voice also means showing them that their point of view is important to you, and that you take it into account.

Customer reviews: for which type of site?

What type of website should display customer reviews?

Well, almost every site! But let’s focus on a few categories of sites that particularly need them.

Customer reviews for ecommerce sites

First of all, let’s talk about ecommerce.

If you manage an online store, it is in your interest to set up two types of customer reviews:

• Product reviews. These are reviews posted on each product page, but also, often, in product lists (where the product rating is often summarized by a number of stars). They are left by customers who have purchased this product. They help visitors to know if these products meet their needs.

• “Generic” reviews. These reviews are not specific to products, but rather to your site and the customer experience. Is the site well done? Is the product fast delivered? Is customer service responsive? In short, these opinions encourage trust, purchase and re-purchase.

Customer reviews for hotels and restaurants

After ecommerce, the second category of companies for which customer feedback is essential are the businesses in the accommodation and catering sector.

We are all aware of the influence of TripAdvisor, the giant customer reviews website in tourism, but also of Yelp‘s and others.

Here are a few figures that will make you dizzy:

• 52% of travellers agree that they would never book a hotel with no reviews at all.
• 72% of customers always or frequently read reviews before making a decision on places to stay, eat or on activities.
• 81% of TripAdvisor users read reviews because it helps them choose the right hotel for their needs.

(Source: Traveldailymedia)

If you manage a company of this type, you are certainly already aware of the impact the customer reviews may have on your business. But you may not have thought of displaying these well-known customer reviews on your website.

However, they are fundamental because your site is, in theory, the first to be displayed when you type the name of your company on Google!

Customer reviews for showcase websites

Do you manage a company that offers products or services for companies or individuals?

Before choosing your company, your prospects will do some research on the Internet, and compare your reputation with that of your competitors.

But be careful: don’t post average or anonymous reviews on your site.

For “social proof” to work, the review must be:

• Authentic
• Nominative
• Detailed

Your website’s visitor must be able to identify himself in the person who wrote the review, and understand the value provided by your service or product. For the review to be trustworthy, it is recommended to be able to display the name of the customer who wrote it, but also his photo and position.

Collecting customer testimonials is therefore of great importance: we will come back to it.

Where to post customer reviews on your site?

If you have read us that far, you have understood the value of customer reviews.

But where should they be displayed so that they have maximum impact?

Of course, if we are talking about an ecommerce site, you will display the product reviews… on the product pages. Makes sense.

It is generally recommended to display the average rating of the product (often in the form of stars) in a very visible way at the top of the product page, but also in product lists and search results. Some sites even offer the satisfaction score as a filter in their catalogue.

Beyond the average score, it is recommended to clearly display the number of reviews. An average satisfaction score does not have the same impact, depending on whether it is calculated from 2 or 500 reviews!

Beyond product reviews, we have seen that it can be very interesting to collect reviews on your brand. These generic opinions can be integrated into several areas:

• On the homepage. Some companies display a selection of customer testimonials on their homepage. That’s smart, because no matter what you can say to promote your products and services, no one will do it better than a customer. Displaying a key figure (98% of satisfied customers, 4.5 out of 5 of average satisfaction…) is also a very good way to draw prospects’ attention as soon as they arrive on your site.
• On strategic pages (to optimize conversions). This can be on the user account creation page, or on the payment page, on a landing page or on a contact page.
• In the footer or sidebar. For example a selection or overview of your customer reviews in a widgets zone. Be creative!

WordPress Customer Reviews solutions

Now that we have understood the value of posting customer reviews on your WordPress site, let’s compare the different ways to collect and display these testimonials.

Depending on your activity, it’s in your interest to choose one or the other of these methods as a priority, or to combine them. This will determine the choice of customer review plugin to install on your site.

How to integrate customer reviews published on social networks and platforms?

There are many platforms on which Internet users will post a review following an interaction with your site or business: Tripadvisor for tourism, Yelp for local businesses, Google Business Profile and Facebook for everyone.

Feel free to encourage your customers or visitors to leave a review on one of these platforms.

Relying on these platforms is a simple and efficient method to collect customer reviews. You can then display them on your site thanks to dedicated WordPress customer review plugins.

You can simply display a “badge” on your site that summarizes your average score or your last reviews like the widgets offered by TripAdvisor.

Pros of this method:

• This boosts the trust that visitors have in your site. If the review comes from a platform, there is a greater tendency to believe it is authentic.
• It’s a sign of transparency. Displaying your TripAdvisor, Google or Facebook reviews on your site shows your customers that you have nothing to hide.
• It’s simple. You rely on a system that already exists, and you don’t have to manage the customer reviews that arrive on your site.

Cons of this method:

• This method does not allow you to manage product reviews for your ecommerce site.
• For this to work, you need to encourage your customers to leave reviews on these platforms, which you don’t control.

Which plugins allow you to display customer reviews posted on platforms?

Widget for Google Reviews

This simple plugin allows you to display a badge or a list of Google Business Profile reviews on any page of your site, via a widget, a shortcode or a page builder.

It also offers a version for Yelp and Facebook. The paid version of the plugin allows you to aggregate reviews from these three platforms.

Download Widget for Google Reviews:

WP TripAdvisor Review Slider

This free plugin works the same way as the previous one. It allows you to retrieve the latest reviews posted on your TripAdvisor page and display them on your site in the form of a slider, a list or a grid. It also exists for Google, Yelp, and Airbnb, and of course offers a paid version.

It’s practical in theory, but you’ll have to be careful with the sliders that can slow down the loading time of your pages.

Don’t hesitate to test the pages of your site with tools like GTMetrix or Pingdom Tools, just to be sure.

Download WP TripAdvisor Review Slider:

Instagram testimonials

Do your customers celebrate your company on Instagram? It’s a shame not to display their review on your site! Well, it’s possible with this little plugin. You can select which Instagram posts to display on your site, and encourage your visitors to write their own testimonial.

The free version can help if you want to test it, but you’ll be quickly limited. Prices start at $5/month if you want more options.

Download Instagram Testimonials:

WP Business Reviews

This is kind of THE star of customer review aggregators for WordPress. It connects to Google, Facebook, Yelp and Zomato (a platform dedicated to restaurants).

The plugin also allows you to integrate your own customer reviews. It displays them in many ways (carousels, lists, galleries) and offers many possibilities to organize customer reviews on your WordPress site.

This plugin is available starting at $99 per year for a use on one site maximum.

Download WP Business Reviews:

How to Integrate customer reviews to WooCommerce?

If you have created an online shop with WooCommerce, you may have noticed that the famous ecommerce plugin offers its own customer reviews system by default.

This option allows you to display a review module on each product page. By default, customer reviews are enabled when you install WooCommerce. You can manage this setting from the WooCommerce menu > Settings > Products.

You can choose whether everyone has the right to leave a review, or only the real customers of your site.

Plugins allow you to enrich the basic functionalities of WooCommerce with additional possibilities for managing your customer reviews.

And as already mentioned, it complements the reviews your customers will be able to post on your brand, in which they will no longer rate the products, but the overall quality of their purchase experience.

Pros of this method:

• Reviews management integrated into your WordPress site: they pop up in your administration, linked to a customer account. You have complete control over how they are displayed on the site.

Cons of this method:

• No cons here. If you have an ecommerce site, you will not be able to do without reviews on your product pages.

There are a number of plugins to improve how you manage WooCommerce’s customer reviews. Here are two particularly interesting ones:

Customer Reviews for WooCommerce

This very complete plugin allows you to send an email automatically after each purchase on your site, to encourage your buyers to write a review.

After the purchase, your customer will receive an email from Customer Reviews, with a link to a form to write a review.

The form is very well done: it displays the photo of each product purchased by your customer in his order, and below, the possibility to put a note and write a comment.

The customers can choose whether to display their name on the site, or remain anonymous. Reviews are automatically integrated into WooCommerce.

This plugin has other advantages:

• It allows you to display product ratings in Google search results, and even integrates with Google Shopping.
• It allows the customer to enrich his review with the photo and even the video of the purchased product.
• It allows you to manage product reviews, but also generic reviews on your shop.
• Emails and forms are customizable.
• Reviews are displayed in the classic way on the product pages, but can also be integrated elsewhere on the site via several Gutenberg blocks, and summarized thanks to a badge.
• Finally, you have the opportunity to thank customers for their review thanks to a discount code: a great way to keep your customers satisfied!

Cherry on the cake: the free version of this plugin is very complete, and if you want to go further, the paid version only costs $49.99 per year.

Download Customer Reviews for WooCommerce:

Judge.me Product Reviews for WooCommerce

Judge.me is a customer feedback management solution that integrates with several ecommerce platforms, including WooCommerce.

Its features are quite similar to Customer Reviews, with one difference: Judge.me significantly improves the standard display of customer reviews on product pages – and that’s a real plus.

This is a product page with the standard WooCommerce notification module: as you can see, notifications are “hidden” behind a “Reviews” tab.

When you click on this tab, the reviews will be displayed in a list.

With the Judge.me plugin, here is how the review will be displayed (by default, below the product description, but it will depend on your theme).

As you can see, Judge.me includes a summary with the number of reviews per rating. It’s still a real plus.

Finally, Judge.me allows me to customize the review form: questions asked, type of rating, etc.

As for the price, Judge.me is available in a free version. For the full version, it will cost $15 per month.

To conclude, customer reviews on your ecommerce site are fundamental. However, you must go beyond the default reviews of WooCommerce to capture quality testimonials, and display these reviews the best way possible so that they increase your sales.

Download Judge.me Product Reviews for WooCommerce

What generic reviews solutions on WordPress?

Not only ecommerce stores can collect customer reviews on their website: any website can set up a customer testimonial collection, with a rating system.

If you manage a blog, a recipe site, or a product catalogue without online sales, it is very easy to set up a customer feedback form, which simply relies on the WordPress feedback system.

Example: On this food blog, reviews are simply integrated into recipe comments.

You also have the possibility to integrate on your site a page dedicated to customer testimonials, with a form allowing a customer to leave his own review.

Pros of this method:

• You have a total control over the form and the questions asked, and you have the possibility to moderate the opinions, to answer them, or even to modify them.
• You are not dependent on platforms, and can therefore collect testimonials without going through Facebook, Google or other. In B2B, it is much preferable.

Cons of this method:

• You will be tempted to keep only positive customer reviews. This is good for your image, but your website’s visitors will not be fooled.

Here is a selection of plugins to set up a customer review system on any WordPress site:

Site Reviews

This free and very simple plugin allows you to collect reviews and display them on your site. Forms and reviews can be integrated on your site via Gutenberg blocks or shortcodes.

A review can be generic, or associated with a post or a page. The result is clean and will easily integrate with your theme. It is a simple and effective solution that will suit many needs.

And in addition, your reviews are compatible with Shema.org microformats (structured data format) that allow you to display them in Google’s results (rich snippets).

Download Site Reviews:

WP Customer Reviews

This free plugin is quite similar to the previous one. It adds on each page or post a “Customer Reviews” block, to enable or disable reviews for that page. It also allows you to display the reviews using a shortcode.

It is therefore particularly suitable if you want to set up WordPress customers reviews on your blog posts or other content.

The free version is quite complete, but you will have to go a little bit into the code to customize it because by default, the look is a little old-fashioned.

Download WP Customer Reviews:

Trusted third parties to obtain verified reviews

In the early 2010’s, as we witnessed a boom in customer reviews and user-generated content, we also began to see an explosion in false customer reviews.

You could pay a company on the other side of the world to write false positive reviews on your Tripadvisor or Yelp page, or even negative comments on your competitor’s page.

Since the very principle of customer reviews is based on trust, companies have started to think about how to ensure that customer reviews posted on an ecommerce site or a review platform are authentic.

How can you be sure that they have been posted by someone who actually bought this product, ate in this restaurant, or stayed in this hotel?

That’s when trusted third parties began to appear. These organizations act as intermediaries between you and your clients. They ask your customers after each purchase to post a review on your site or your products.

They then allow you to integrate these reviews on your site, via a badge or a list of reviews, or on the product pages of your ecommerce site.

Pros of this method:

• You only display on your site reviews from real customers. It is the ultimate trust guarantee.
• The collection of review is carried out by a third party, which reassures your customers against the possibility of fraud.
• Generally, these providers offer additional options: GDPR protection, national norm certifications, reviews displayed on Google’s rich snippets, etc.
• These solutions also provide a moderating area to engage in conversation with unsatisfied customers.

Cons of this method:

• It is more difficult to set up than the others. You will have to set up an export of your customer orders to the service providers so that they can send the form.
• The rates are higher than other solutions. Count between $40 and $70 excl. tax per month for 500 orders per month.

Here are some of the famous players in this market:

• Trusted Shops: this solution offers a WooCommerce plugin (be careful if you want to use it, it is very poorly rated at the time of writing).
• Ekomi: this solution integrates with WooCommerce but does not offer a public plugin.
• Guaranteed reviews: this solution offers a WordPress plugin.
• Trustpilot: this solution offers a WooCommerce plugin. Be careful, on the website trustpilot.com, you will not only find verified reviews. Trustpilot refers many shops and ecommerce sites to its site and anyone can post a review.

Which solutions to display your customers’ testimonials?

Much has been said in this article about classic customer reviews, with a note and a comment, as seen on ecommerce sites or cooking recipes.

But this type of review does not fit all needs.

You may need to display on your site personalized testimonials, with your client’s photo, a quote, a logo, a link to a website.

This is commonly referred to as “testimonials”. A testimonial is more than just a customer review: it is a strong testimonial that aims to help your site visitors project themselves into the use of your product or service.

If you go to WooCommerce, you will see an example.

Testimonials are often used by B2B companies.

To collect these testimonials, you can send a satisfaction survey once a year or at the end of a service to your customers.

To do this, use a free questionnaire service like Google Forms, Typeform, or a form creation plugin like Gravity Forms (affiliate link) or Ninja Forms.

At WPMarmite, we now use Senja to collect testimonials. We were searching for a tool to collect and classify testimonials. We finally found something amazing.

Analyze the results, and when you come across a positive comment, ask your customer for their agreement to post their testimonial on your site.

You can even interview your customers by phone and then, with their agreement, write a testimonial that you will publish on your site.

An important element in obtaining quality testimonials is to ask the right questions. Since you are familiar with the questionnaire, do not hesitate to ask several of them, for example:

• Why did you choose this product over another?
• Would you recommend our product/company to a friend?
• What has this product changed in your daily life?
• Why do you like this product?
• Do you have any improvements to suggest?

Pros of this method:

• The strength of the testimony is that it is generally nominative, even illustrated with the client’s photo: your customers are definitely your advocates, and this is worth all the arguments.
• You have complete control over the testimonies posted, their content, the way they are written.
• Testimonials are often formatted in a more advantageous way than basic customer reviews, and most themes and plugins offer many customization options.

Cons of this method:

• You need to get your customers’ agreement to post their testimonials on your site, which is not always easy.
• Customer testimonials are not exhaustive: you generally post 3 or 4 on a site, sometimes more, but in any case, they do not claim to be representative of all your customers. It’s more of a marketing process, and your site visitors are not easily fooled.

To display these reviews in an elegant way on your site and thus boost conversions, you have two solutions:

• Either your theme natively integrates an option (Gutenberg block, side bar, dedicated area) allowing to add testimonials: this is the case for many themes such as Astra or OceanWP.
• Either your theme doesn’t support them, or not enough, and you will need a plugin. I have selected some of them below.

Strong Testimonials

This plugin is sort of a customer review plugin for WordPress mixed with a testimonial plugin. Indeed, it allows you to display your customer testimonials on your site in a very flexible way with a Gutenberg Block, a shortcode system and several templates.

You can display where you want a particular testimonial, a list or a grid of testimonials, a slide show, etc.

But you can also set up a form on your site to collect these testimonials. The result is professional and integrates well with most themes. No bling-bling functionality: it’s a simple and efficient plugin.

The custom field system allows you to choose what you want to display on your customer testimonial: name, company, function, photo, logo, website, etc.

Download Strong Testimonials:

Thrive Ovation

This plugin integrates a lot of smart functionalities, like the possibility to turn the comments on your blog or positive tweets into elegant testimonials for your WordPress site.

It also enables to create dedicated landing pages to collect testimonials from your customers. It also allows you to get the testimonials approved by your customers!

You can get it from $56,40 for the use on 1 site.

Download Thrive Ovation:

Elementor Website Builder

Elementor is a particular plugin since it is also a page builder. This tool enables to create pages without knowing how to code, by a simple drag and drop feature thanks to ready-to-use pages templates.

Elementor is the most popular page builder of the WordPress ecosystem, with more than 10 millions of users to date. It has a lot of functionalities and offers a widget to add and custom your testimonials easily.

This option is also available with Divi Builder or Beaver Builder, to name a few.

Elementor offers a free version and full Pro version allowing to customize your whole site (including the header and the footer).

Download Elementor Website Builder:

Final opinion on customer reviews on WordPress

Along these lines, you have discovered the perks of customer reviews on WordPress. According to your needs and your business, there are different ways to add them on your site.

Most of the time, a dedicated plugin will do the job, but don’t forget that famous platforms like Trustpilot can also be integrated into your content.

Anyway, it is a very powerful feature to strenghen the social proof and credibility of your site, while increasing your sales of products and/or services.

Do you use customer reviews on your site? Tell us about your experience in the comments!