Thinking about trying a WordPress review plugin? Here's a stat for you: Consumers want to hear from other consumers before doing business with a brand. According to BrightLocal, the average consumer reads 10 reviews before feeling able to trust a local business.
Plus, we don't necessarily have to know the person to trust their recommendation. According to the same study by Bright Local, 76% of consumers trust customer reviews and testimonials as much as personal recommendations.
Providing potential customers with this valuable information on your WordPress website is easy. Thanks to WordPress plugins, you can add customer reviews to your site without needing to code or create a template from scratch. Let's look at your best options below.
Why should you use WordPress review plugins?
Unless you want to write a review module into the code itself, review plugins are the best way to add reviews to WordPress. The right review plugin will make reviews a seamless feature of your website’s pages and provide enough customization to match your branding and preferences.
Of course, there’s also the question of whether to include reviews on your website at all. If you sell a product or service, we recommend customer reviews or testimonials in one form or another, for several reasons.
The main benefit of including customer reviews is that they help your visitors make a purchase. According to Trustpilot, almost nine out of 10 consumers read reviews before buying products online. These shoppers want to be sure that they’re making a good choice — a review plugin (and presumably great reviews) establishes credibility, helping them to ease their mind and add to their cart.
Some other important advantages of online reviews include:
- Feedback: Reviews aren’t just for buyers. You can gain valuable insight into your product from what customers are saying. Use this candid feedback to improve your product and brand.
- Increased engagement: When visitors spend more time browsing and interacting with your website, they’re more likely to complete a purchase. Reviews are another form of content for users to read, and this increased engagement can improve conversions.
- Social proof: Reviews are a powerful source of social proof. A large number of positive reviews carries a lot of weight for a customer on the brink of a purchase. Everyone is buying it, so why shouldn’t you?
- SEO: Many WordPress review plugins can add schema markup (essentially special HTML) to your site that will show your reviews in Google search results as rich snippets. This provides more information to the browsing the SERPs and helps your content rank higher. For example, a Google rich snippet with star reviews looks like this:
- Addressing knowledge gaps: Your product pages may not cover everything shoppers want to know about your product, but reviews can fill in any missing info. Alternatively, you could allow visitors to ask questions about the product and receive replies from customers, or address common questions in a FAQ section.
- Customer interaction: Consumers are increasingly valuing a brand’s ability to speak with them directly, and reviews can be a great forum for this. Send thanks for positive reviews and try to remedy negative ones — this shows the person leaving the review, and more importantly those reading it, that your brand cares about their experience.
If you're worried about not having enough reviews, there are steps you can take to get more reviews on your site. Still, customers can't leave reviews if you don't allow them to.
So, now that we understand why reviews (and review plugins) are valuable, let's look at some of the best ones.
Best WordPress Review Plugins
The best WordPress review plugins will offer the templates and customization options you need to quickly add stylish reviews to your site. Below are a mix of premium and free plugins that do exactly that so you can add social proof to your site on any budget.
1. WP Customer Reviews
Best for: Free, simple customer reviews for users with some HTML and CSS knowledge.
WP Customer Reviews is a free all-in-one solution for collecting, moderating, and publishing reviews on your WordPress site.
With this plugin, you can set up a simple form that allows users to submit reviews on the front-end of your site. You can require them to include their name, email, and any other information along with their review or simply include those as optional input fields.
Once reviews are submitted on the front end, you can view them in your dashboard and publish them or set them to private. If you choose to publish them, they'll display in the format below.
You can also customize this template, but you'll need to be familiar with some HTML and CSS to do so. Why? Because rather than add customization options in your WP dashboard like other plugins, WP Customer Reviews simply includes an external stylesheet.
2. Site Reviews
Best for: Flexible site reviews that you can place with blocks, widgets, or shortcodes.
With over 40,000 downloads to date, Site Reviews is one of the most popular review plugins for WordPress. The core version of the plugin is free, with added functions available through premium add-ons.
This plugin packs a lot of functionality for free and lets you display reviews in the style of your active theme, placed with blocks, widgets, or shortcodes. Reviews allow for star ratings and let you choose how the dates are formatted.
The free version also lets you configure various aspects of your comments. You can require users to sign up for an account before leaving a review, pin specific reviews to the top, approve individual reviews for publishing, receive email notifications when new reviews are submitted, and integrate with WooCommerce using a free extension. You’ll also be able to reply to reviews.
With paid add-ons, you can sort and search reviews, make custom review forms, add images to reviews, customize your review notifications, and make themes specifically for your review sections.
3. Reviewer WordPress Plugin
Best for: Premium WordPress reviews with customizable themes.
Reviewer WordPress plugin is the best-selling review plugin in the CodeCanyon marketplace.
Reviewer is flexible enough that you can insert review boxes and comparison tables into your posts, pages, and custom post types based on responsive templates, or create your own from scratch. For any template, you can set the review criteria, score range, colors, labels, font size, icons, and more. You can also choose the rating system you prefer: five stars, bars, or custom criteria.
This premium plugin has also recently added support for Google ReCaptcha to prevent spam reviews and Google rich snippets to help your reviews rank better on SERPs.
4. WP Review
Best for: Premium WordPress reviews with high customizability, theme compatibility, and rich snippets.
MyThemeShop created the WP Review plugin as an all-in-one solution for creating a review website. There's a free version for those on a budget, and a premium version for site owners that need more features and design options. We'll focus on the latter below.
WP Review Pro comes with 16 pre-designed review templates that you can customize. To ensure these reviews match your branding, you can change the font, background, header, and border color of your template. You can also select the rating system you prefer, whether that be the star, point, percentage, circle, or a thumbs up/thumbs down rating.
Here's a look at the Xiaomi template with star ratings.
Let's say you already have some great reviews on other websites. Thanks to WP Review's integrations, you can now add Google, Yelp, and Facebook reviews to your WordPress site.
This plugin doesn't just make it easier to add reviews to your site — it also makes it easier to improve your rankings in search engines. WP Review Pro supports 19 types of rich snippets. Some are for articles, while others are for books, movies, music, games, and more.
5. Let's Review WordPress Plugin With Affiliate Options
Best for: Affiliate marketing WordPress websites.
The Let’s Review WordPress plugin is ideal for affiliate marketing. With this plugin, you can add beautiful, responsive review boxes with affiliate links to your posts. This can help you monetize your blog or website without looking like spam.
Since Let’s Review is compatible with the Gutenberg editor, it adds blocks that enable you to build custom review boxes by simply dragging and dropping elements on the page. You can add unlimited criteria, pros and cons, image galleries, bars, star ratings, custom icons, animation effects, and more.
Below are some of the ways you can format your reviews with the Let’s Review WordPress plugin.
6. Taqyeem
Best for: Star, point, and percentage ratings from a relatively inexpensive review plugin.
Taqyeem is another best-selling review plugin in the CodeCanyon marketplace. With this premium plugin, you can add a review box to any post or page, including custom post types, and to your site’s sidebar. In the sidebar, you can set the display to the best reviews, the most recent, or a random collection.
You can ensure the review box matches your branding by changing the color, typography, and rating system. The supported rating systems are stars, points, and percentages.
7. WP Rich Snippets
Best for: Reviews focused on Google rich snippet compatibility.
WP Rich Snippets is another premium plugin that enables you to add reviews on your site and create rich snippets for SERPs.
Using the WP Rich Snippets widget, you can decide the style, type, and number of reviews to display in the sidebar of your website. You can also display an excerpt of the review, include a thumbnail image, and order them by best ratings.
For snippets, you can select the type — article, review, product, organization, restaurant, or software application — which can help search engines recognize your post and increase the chances of them ranking. And you can select the rating system: star rating, percentage, votes, aggregate, or none if you don’t want to include any rating.
8. Customer Reviews for WooCommerce
Best for: WooCommerce websites with customer reviews.
Customer Reviews for WooCommerce is one of the best WooCommerce plugins.
With this free review plugin, you can set up automatic emails to ask customers who recently made a purchase to leave a review. Once they do submit a review, the plugin will send it to an external service to verify that it’s not spam before publishing it. For display options, you can choose to format them in a slider, as a grid, or in list format on any post or page.
You can then send an automated email with a coupon to thank the customer for submitting a review. For these reasons, this plugin is an excellent tool for building trust and engaging both existing and potential customers.
There's also a pro version available if you're looking for additional features.
9. Widgets for Google Reviews
Best for: Displaying Google reviews on a WordPress site.
Google reviews appear aside your business profile in Google search results. With Widgets for Google Reviews, you can also show Google reviews of your business on your WordPress website in several formats. This is a great option for service-based businesses and restaurants that want to display reviews for the overall business instead of individual products.
For free, you can place widgets with up to 10 Google reviews on your website, as well as pick and choose which ones you want publicly visible. The plugin prides itself on being easy to use, and there are 25 styles to choose from, allowing you to find one that blends with your theme. It’s also compatible with page builders including Elementor, WPBakery, and Beaver Builder.
Trustindex, the developer of this plugin, offers premium features you can use with this plugin. By signing up, you can display reviews from other platforms like Yelp and Facebook, place an unlimited number of widgets, hide reviews, get detailed stats on your widgets’ performance, and more.
10. Easy Testimonials
Best for: Testimonial reviews.
Easy Testimonials is a free plugin that's ideal for adding a specific type of review, known as testimonials, to your WordPress site. These are reviews that provide information about a customer's overall experience with a company and how its product or service provided them value, and are always positive. However, you can use the Easy Testimonials plugin to only add testimonials or to add both positive and negative reviews to your website.
With this plugin, you can choose a template and customize it with a customer photo, star rating, and unique background color. Then, add this review in the sidebar of your site, as a widget, or embedded in a page or post. Here is an example of a template:
If you’re a more advanced user, you can use filters to completely customize the HTML of the pre-designed templates or upload your own custom template. There's also a custom CSS box for customizing how your reviews display on different screen sizes.
If you need more font options and template styles or want a form to collect testimonials on the front end of your site, there is a pro version available.
Adding the Customer Voice to Your Site
All of the review plugins mentioned above can help you create review posts and rich snippets with ease. This can help you build trust with prospective customers and rank better on SERPs.
Once you attract visitors to your site in these ways, you can work on converting them with live chat, forms, and other features.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in August 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
