Getting a five-star rating always creates a good feeling. You work hard for good customer reviews, so you should display them proudly!
Customers expect that if a business offers excellent products or services, it will be clearly advertised through reviews. Google also knows this and rewards your website for featuring legitimate reviews from trusted platforms. That’s why you should showcase testimonials on your website and also make effort to get more testimonials.
Showing ratings helps customers make purchase decisions faster and improves your website’s visibility. In fact, one study found that 58% of people feel positive about choosing a local business with a high star rating!
But how do you go about it?
Well, there are WordPress plugins for this exact task! In this article, we will go over the benefits of using WordPress rating plugins and explore the 8 best star rating plugins to help you identify the one best suited to your needs.
Why use a WordPress rating plugin?
The alternative to using a plugin for showcasing ratings and WP customer reviews is modifying and adding code to your WordPress core files. This has a lot of risks: the smallest mistake could lead to your site malfunctioning! That’s why coding is only recommended if you’re an experienced developer.
Using a WordPress rating plugin has multiple benefits, including:
Better SEO visibility and rankings
Displaying real customer reviews and ratings on your website increases your traffic. Reviews tend to include keywords and phrases that match what is used by potential customers when searching for products or services. This can improve the website’s search engine ranking for all kinds of keywords, including long-tail keywords.
Google considers reviews and ratings from your Google Business profile, 3rd party rating platforms, as well as your own website to determine your ranking. It considers various factors related to reviews, such as the quantity, recency, sentiment, and overall rating across different platforms.
Improved chances of featuring in Google’s rich snippets
Google’s rich snippets are a type of SERP result which displays “rich” details about your website and business, like images, ratings, location, and price range. A good WordPress rating plugin will enable you to add review schema markup in your website’s code without having to actually code yourself. This markup data helps and encourages Google to create and display rich snippets for your website.
Establishing trust with potential customers
Displaying user-generated reviews and ratings from various platforms on your website is a great way to leverage social proof. It can help establish and build trust by letting potential customers know you are a legitimate business that cares about its customers and showing them what customers have to say about your products or services. It also helps encourage more testimonials from your existing customers!
Customization options and easy ratings management
Plugins help you customize the appearance of the reviews on your website through personalized review badges, display formats, and filters. Not only does this make your reviews look good, but it also enables you to display reviews in the style best suited to your website design.
Top 8 rating plugins for your WordPress website
Each rating WordPress plugin has different features, as well as unique limitations. Let’s jump right into the eight best options for your site.
1. WP Review Slider Pro
One of the best plugins you can use to add star ratings to your website is WP Review Slider Pro. This star-rating WordPress plugin allows you to show off all the best reviews with a straightforward plugin. It’s easy to use and has everything you need for your business.
Top features
- Pull ratings and reviews from 90+ platforms: The number of integrated platforms alone sets this plugin apart from others, which often pull from just Google, Yelp, and Facebook. WP Review Slider also Pro pulls from Airbnb, IMDB, eBay, TripAdvisor, Amazon and more.
- Display reviews in custom attractive formats: WP Review Slider Pro offers attractive review formats and customization options. You can use customized floating badges, pop-ups, and sliders. The level of customization includes fonts, text size, colors, borders for reviews, and icon options for displaying ratings in a way that matches your site’s brand and aesthetic.
- Apply review schema for Google Rich Snippets: With this plugin, you can easily add review and ratings schema markup for your reviews in a matter of seconds!
To learn more about how this plugin enables you to display ratings in minutes, read this guide to adding review and aggregate rating schema to your WordPress site.
Pros and cons
Compared to other plugins, WP Review Slider Pro really shines! Aside from the features listed above, it also offers review analytics features with graphs and charts (such as the one below) for your reviews.
You can also manually add reviews, sync with reviews on your WooCommerce store, and set auto-update settings to showcase your most recent reviews. With the plugin’s form feature, you can also create custom forms using conditional logic to get more reviews.
Pricing
All of this functionality comes at the cost of just $29 per year, which makes this plugin the most value for money! Check out all our pricing plans here.
2. Site Reviews
Site Reviews is a plugin that allows customers to submit reviews with a 1-5 star rating on your website. This star-rating WordPress plugin comes with widgets, shortcodes, blocks, and full documentation.
One of the top advantages of this plugin is that you can pin the best reviews so that they appear first. It also has a built-in approval system that you can use for rating moderation before any reviews are published. Additionally, there’s an option that requests users to log in to write a review so you can capture more client information.
Top features
- Easy rating submission: The Site Reviews WordPress plugin enables visitors to submit one- to five-star reviews directly on your site. They work similarly to sites like Yelp that collect reviews but on your own site.
- Display your best reviews from registered customers: Site Reviews comes with standard features such as blocks, shortcodes, and review widgets. But you can also manually pin your best reviews so they are featured most prominently on your site. You also manually approve new submissions for placement on your homepage, and only registered users can submit reviews while logged in. This ensures only customers can provide testimonials.
Pros and cons
This is a great tool that only recently started offering more advanced functionalities but its steep price can still put off some smaller businesses.
Pricing
You can get the premium version for $89/year.
3. Taqyeem
Taqyeem is a star-rating WordPress plugin with the functionality to add ratings and reviews to your pages, posts, and custom post types. Take advantage of the customization options.
Top features
- Advanced customization options: Taqyeem was built with customization in mind, including settings for images, unlimited colors, 500+ Google Web fonts, and styles like percentage, points, or star rating.
- Review filtering: It has filtering features that give you complete control over which reviews are featured on your homepage.
- Additional features: Taqyeem also supports Schema SEO microdata and localization. Taqyeem also builds business reviews infrastructure into your site, turning it into a “Yelp” of its own.
Pros and cons
While the level of customization supported is impressive, and the pricing is very reasonable, Taqyeem doesn’t offer the advanced features (analytics, etc.) that help businesses scale.
Pricing
Plans start at $29/year.
4. YASR – Yet Another Stars Rating
Yet Another Stars Rating is a versatile WordPress star rating plugin that is also a bit on the higher end but still offers a lot of nifty features and a 14-day free trial for people who want to test it out first.
Top features
- Customization options: YASR is another rating WordPress plugin focusing on customization options and comes with many pre-built themes and customization options, including visual aspects of the star rating.
- Additional features: YASR also offers interesting additional features like multi-criteria rating, which allows your customers to add ratings for aspects of a product, and rich snippet support, too!
Pros and cons
This plugin is on the pricier side compared to other options and doesn’t nearly have as many features or ease of use.
Pricing
YASR pricing plans start at $47.88 per year (one site), but it also has monthly and lifetime options that can go up to $439.99 for lifetime access for 30 websites.
5. WP Customer Reviews
With WP Customer Reviews, you can set up a specific page on your WordPress website or blog to receive client testimonials. This star-rating WordPress plugin includes shortcodes for inserting reviews, moderated submissions, and custom fields.
Top features
- Standard rating features: Like most plugins on this list, WP Customer Reviews offers rating filtering, schema formatting, shortcodes, review types, and custom fields for displaying reviews and ratings.
- Unique features: WP Customer Reviews offers some more unique functionality compared to other entries. It offers extra spam protection, caching, and submission moderation. It’s also multi-site and multi-user compatible.
Pros and cons
While WP Customer Reviews does come with a list of unique features, it seems to have a lot of negative reviews itself. Many surround its complex setup. However, it is a completely free plugin!
Pricing
This plugin is available for free!
6. Customer Reviews for WooCommerce
Customer Reviews offers the option to add verified reviews to WooCommerce websites of all sizes. It works by automatically inviting verified customers to add their reviews to your website, including the option to rate multiple different products or services.
Top features
- Built for WooCommerce: This review plugin is specifically built for the needs of eCommerce businesses, with a focus on sales, SEO, engagement, and customer loyalty.
- Schema markup features: This plugin supports using schema markup to enable you to improve your rankings.
Pros and cons
While it is a competitive option for WooCommerce users, some reviews suggest a lack of support. However, overall, it’s a mostly well-received plugin.
Pricing
The Pro version with most of the features starts at $49 per year. There is also a free version available.
7. WP Review Pro
WP Review Pro is a plugin that offers a multitude of useful features for businesses with multiple websites. However, since it doesn’t offer any single-site purchase options, it’s not recommended for small businesses or owners that only have a few websites.
Top features
- Customization options: WP Review Pro comes with the basic WordPress review plugin features plus some extra customization and functionality. They offer 16 templates you can tailor to your brand and ensure compatibility with your existing WordPress theme.
- Support for rich snippets: This plugin supports 19 types of rich snippets for different types of products like books, games, and movies.
- Supports multiple types of ratings: You can display various types of ratings like stars, thumbs up, percentages, and points.
Pros and cons
Despite its customization features, WP Review Pro doesn’t include important advanced features. There are also fewer platforms to draw reviews from when compared to other plugins, although it does offer a WooCommerce integration. It also comes at only one price for unlimited sites. This makes it applicable only to businesses with more comprehensive needs (there are no single site packages).
Pricing
The plugin is available starting at $67 (per year if you want updates beyond one year).
8. Plugin for Google Reviews
Plugin for Google Review’s free version uses an API to directly feature Google Reviews on your WordPress website. However, if you want to have some more advanced features and include more platforms, you have to opt for the Business version of the plugin, which comes at $120 per year for 5 websites.
Top features
- Display Google reviews optimally: This plugin collates and displays your Google reviews on your website as a widget in your header, footer, or sidebar.
- Supportive features for reviews and ratings: Plugin for Google Reviews also offers support for several languages, enables you to display reviews in formats like sliders, grids, and trust badges, and pulls Google, Yelp, and Facebook reviews.
Pros and cons
While it supports drastically fewer platforms than other plugins, this plugin works well for smaller companies looking to display a few reviews from Google or Yelp. Though it has a free version, most of its useful features, like sorting and filtering, and making custom layouts for rating and reviews, are only available in the paid version.
Pricing
This plugin has a free version, and its paid business version is priced at $85 per year.
How to add WordPress star ratings
WPRSP has many features that set it apart from the competition, such as its integration with popular review platforms, the full customization of star reviews, review analytics, and many more.
However, one of the more outstanding ones is the extremely easy set-up and configuration process. Here is a quick tutorial on how to do this.
Remember that WPRSP is a paid product, so before you start, make sure you’ve purchased and downloaded the plugin.
1. Activate the plugin from your WordPress account.
2. Type in the License code sent to your email address. After that, click the Agree & Activate License button.
3. Check your inbox for the activation email and activate the plugin.
4. Afterward, go into the system settings and add review source sites. Choose the one you need and follow the simple on-screen instructions to add the site to your review sources.
5. If you already have WooCommerce product reviews, you can add them by clicking on the WooCommerce button and syncing the information.
6. Next, turn off the default WooCommerce review system by unchecking the “Enable product reviews” option in the general product settings of WooCommerce. Make sure you save any changes.
7. Choose a star rating template.
8. From there, you can design new templates and export/import existing ones. The main menu lets you see all the current templates and make changes.
9. From the Template Style button, you can choose the layout you like best. Here are some template examples that you get with WP Review Slider Pro:
10. Once you have a chosen template, you can set up review filters to choose exactly what shows up on your website.
Tips for displaying ratings on your WordPress website
Making the most out of your ratings requires taking proper advantage of rating WordPress plugins. You can also take advantage of some “pro tips” to maximize their effectiveness! Here are our top recommendations:
Place reviews where they are most visible
The first step is placement. It’s best to place your reviews where they are most visible while being careful with the page layout. For example, if you place reviews above the fold, make sure there’s no banner or popup covering them.
Monitor activity on your site
You must also remain aware of how your settings are affecting your site. For example, auto-updates are a great feature to have. But you should still monitor the activity on your site, ensuring you feature positive testimonials and keep the UI of your widget optimized.
WP Review Slider Pro comes with a powerful and easy-to-use review management system that is packed with functions such as:
- Moderating spam reviews.
- Receiving notifications for positive and negative testimonials.
Use form logic
If you use forms, on the other hand, use form logic. One great example of this is using form logic so that if the reviewer is giving a low rating, they aren’t immediately directed to share it on social media. That way, only the positive reviewers will be given a suggestion to share for the world to see.
Commonly asked questions
Which is the best free WordPress rating plugin?
There are many rating plugins with free versions, like WP Customer Reviews, Customer Reviews for WooCommerce, and Plugin for Google Reviews. But for advanced features and reliable support, it’s best to consider a plugin like WP Review Slider Pro.
Can I not use a plugin to get reviews on my WordPress website?
As we discussed above, you can get reviews by creating forms and displaying them in custom formats on your website using code. But this can be difficult and risky for non-developers. A plugin will do a far better job, reduce risks, and also automates most of the process for you, making it easier for you to manage reviews!
How do I enable ratings in WordPress?
You enable the default WordPress ratings by going to the dashboard and then to the WooCommerce settings. After that, go to the Products tab and scroll down until you find the Reviews section. Enable the product review checkbox and save the changes. Keep in mind that the default WooCommerce rating system doesn’t offer much room for customization, which is why it’s recommended to use a special plugin like the WP Review Slider Pro.
How do I add a 5-star rating in WordPress?
With WP Review Slider Pro, you can quickly add 5-star reviews to your website and customize their appearance. Just install the plugin and connect it with the review platform you’re using. And just like that, all your 5-star reviews are now ready to be displayed on your website. With the advanced customization options, you choose a template that fits the design of your website, as well as put a filter view so that customers see the 5-star reviews first.
Get started with WP Review Slider Pro
Overall, WP Review Slider Pro checks all the boxes you’re looking for in a WordPress rating plugin:
- It comes at an affordable price.
- There’s zero coding required to get started (not even HTML).
- It has a number of advanced features, including form logic, analytics with charts, and support for rich snippets.
- There’s even the option to use custom CSS if you like
- With its easy-to-use interface, customizable options, and compatibility with a vast number of review platforms, WP Review Slider Pro makes it simple for businesses to enhance their online reputation.
Get started and harness the power of customer reviews and ratings today!
