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 BrightLocal, 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.
- What are WordPress review plugins?
- Why should you use WordPress review plugins?
- Best WordPress Review Plugins
What are WordPress review plugins?
WordPress review plugins are plugins that help you collect and/or display reviews on your website. These could be your own reviews that you're writing about products, or they could be reviews from customers about your own business.
Many review plugins focus on helping you collect and display customer reviews. These plugins could add review forms to your own site. They could also help you import reviews from other platforms like Google My Business, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and more.
If you're writing your own product reviews (e.g., for affiliate marketing), WordPress review plugins can also help you add stylish review summary boxes to make your views more engaging and boost your conversions.
Regardless of which approach you choose, pretty much all WordPress review plugins will also add schema markup so that you can get those eye-catching rich results in search engines like Google.
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 ease their minds and add to their cart.
Some other important advantages of online reviews include the following.
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
1. WP Customer Reviews
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 frontend 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.
Best for: Free, simple customer reviews for users with some HTML and CSS knowledge.
Price: 100% free.
2. Site Reviews
Active on over 50,000 WordPress sites, 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.
Best for: Flexible site reviews that you can place with blocks, widgets, or shortcodes.
Price: Free; individual premium add-ons from €29 or bundle of all add-ons from €89.
3. WP Review
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.
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.
Best for: Premium WordPress reviews with high customizability, theme compatibility, and rich snippets.
Price: Free version; $67 for the premium version.
4. Otter Blocks
Otter Blocks is not a dedicated WordPress review plugin. Rather, it's a plugin that extends the native WordPress editor (AKA Gutenberg) with a bunch of new editor blocks and features.
Where this ties in with reviews, though, is that one of the new blocks that it adds is a product review block. You can use this block to easily add a review summary box to any content on your site, including overall ratings, ratings for individual categories, pros and cons, CTA links to purchase the product, and a review summary.
For your human visitors, it provides a nice summary of the content in your review and can help you boost your sales, which is great for affiliate marketing. On the backend, the plugin also adds the proper schema markup to help you get those eye-catching, review-rich results in Google.
Best for: Adding a dedicated product review block to the native WordPress editor (Gutenberg).
Price: 100% free. There is a premium version of Otter Blocks, but you can access the review block in the free version.
5. Let's Review WordPress Plugin With Affiliate Options
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.
Best for: Affiliate marketing WordPress websites.
Price: $29 with lifetime updates.
6. Taqyeem
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.
Best for: Star, point, and percentage ratings from a relatively inexpensive review plugin.
Price: $29 with lifetime updates.
7. WP Rich Snippets
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.
Plus, you can select the rating system: star rating, percentage, votes, aggregate, or none if you don’t want to include any rating.
Best for: Reviews focused on Google-rich snippet compatibility.
Price: From $69.
8. Customer Reviews for WooCommerce
Customer Reviews for WooCommerce is one of the best WooCommerce review 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.
Best for: WooCommerce websites with customer reviews.
Price: Free version; $49.99 for premium version.
9. Widgets for Google Reviews
Google reviews appear beside 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 Page Builder, 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.
Best for: Displaying Google reviews on a WordPress site.
Price: Free version; from $65 for premium version.
10. Easy Testimonials
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 add only testimonials or 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.
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.
Best for: Collecting and displaying testimonial reviews.
Price: Free version; from $99 for premium version.
11. PowerPack for Elementor
PowerPack for Elementor is similar to the Otter Blocks plugin above. But while Otter Blocks is focused on extending the native WordPress block editor, PowerPack for Elementor is focused on extending the popular Elementor page builder plugin with new widgets and features.
This plugin can help you work with Elementor reviews in two ways.
First, it offers a Review Box widget that lets you add a review summary box to any Elementor design. You can add an overall rating and summary, as well as ratings for specific areas and pros/cons.
Second, it also offers a Business Reviews widget that lets you import and display reviews from Yelp and/or Google My Business.
Basically, it can work for both people who are looking to add review boxes to their own product reviews, as well as businesses looking to show off customer reviews from other platforms.
Best for: Users looking to create product review boxes or import business reviews in Elementor designs.
Price: From $49. There is a free version at WordPress.org, but you need the premium version to access the review widgets.
12. Starfish Reviews
Starfish Reviews is a WordPress review plugin that helps you run review generation campaigns. If you're not familiar with this concept, the basic idea is that the plugin helps you encourage your customers to leave reviews on third-party review platforms like Google My Business, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Trustpilot, and more.
To do this effectively, you can create “review funnels,” much like how you might create “sales funnels” to sell products. You can also include multiple review platforms so that customers can leave reviews on their preferred platform, and you can view analytics to see which platforms are the most effective.
With the premium version, Starfish Reviews can also help you import those reviews from third-party platforms and display them on your own WordPress site.
Best for: Businesses that are looking to run review generation campaigns to get more user reviews from customers.
Price: Free version; from $37 per month for premium version.
13. Real Testimonials
As the name suggests, Real Testimonials is a WordPress review plugin that's primarily focused on helping you collect and display customer testimonial reviews on your site.
To get more reviews, you can create frontend testimonial forms and widgets that customers can use to leave their reviews. In addition to leaving text reviews, the premium version of the plugin also lets customers leave video testimonials, which is a unique feature when compared to other WordPress review plugins.
Once you've gathered customer reviews, the plugin can help you display them in multiple different layouts including sliders, columns, masonry grids, isotope grids, and lists. It also adds proper schema markup to help you get review-rich results in search engine listing pages.
Best for: Businesses looking to collect and display authentic customer testimonials in multiple formats.
Price: Free version; from $49 for premium version.
Try These WordPress Review Plugins Today
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.
