Are you interested in knowing how to show customer reviews in WordPress? Then keep reading this article!
For some years now, most of the business are online. It means there’s an incredible competition between various vendors in making sure they come across trustworthy and deliver the best possible services.
Across time, there were various boxes to check that would make you a trusted seller or an authority in the domain you’re. However, as more and more such websites started to appear, and the old techniques stopped working, the strategy changed.
Nowadays, you can quickly get a good-looking WordPress website, with plenty of features, and a professional feel about it. So, the thing that separates websites in terms of credibility and boosting sales is the user’s capability of finding verified customer reviews.
In 2020 reviews are like “word of mouth 2.0”. They act as social proof and the more comfortable you make it for users to find them, the bigger chances of selling you have. In case you’re just starting a website using WordPress and have no idea what WordPress plugin to use for customer review, we have some ideas for you.
However, before talking about reviews in WordPress, we’re going to dig deeper into the importance of customer reviews. You’re going to appreciate customer reviews even more!
Why Go With Customer Reviews On a WordPress Site In The First Place?
If you’re asking this question while building the website, you’re already on the right path.
It is also an excellent opportunity to make your website be more authoritative and improve it from an SEO standpoint.
Search Engines do have weightage for customer reviews. These product reviews from customers are calculated as aggregate reviews and are displayed as star ratings at search results.And if you’re not convinced by these two viable reasons, adding this functionality to your WordPress Editor gives you valuable information. It is what your customers like and dislike about your product or process so that you can improve in the future.
Where To Put The Customer Reviews on Your Website?
All right, so you decided to use customer reviews on the website, but you’re not sure where to place them. It’s not uncommon since most WordPress themes come with multiple locations for placing the reviews section.
However, you don’t have to worry too much about where you should place them. Here are a few suggestions:
- On the homepage– many companies out there decide to display reviews from customers or testimonials directly on the first page. While this isn’t precisely WordPress news, it’s a perfect tactic because you give potential customers direct access to what other customers think about your business. Make sure to display a key figure and don’t overdo it with reviews on the homepage.
- On other strategic pages– these pages can vary from the product pages or payment page or user account creation. Usually, when using testimonials on these pages, you are aiming to improve conversions.
- In a sidebar or footer– where you can use a widget for customer reviews that can be accessed from pretty much any page of the website. You shouldn’t have a hard time finding WordPress templates that offer this functionality.
WordPress Customer Review Integrations
You can get your reviews in front of potential customers by integrating reviews from other social platforms.
For example, get the reviews people left on Facebook, Google Places, Yelp, or TripAdvisor.
TripAdvisor or Booking is best for hotels or resorts, and Yelp functions best with local businesses. At the same time, Google and Facebook are more general. They could deliver excellent results on a broader range of companies.
You’ll probably need a WordPress tutorial to get through the process of integrating reviews from other platforms. However, the process isn’t complicated at all. It requires you to install an appropriate WordPress plugin, but, again, that shouldn’t be too big of a problem.
Importing reviews give you the advantage of making your audience feel real and convinced.
Another advantage is that you show you’re transparent about your business, you’re not just showing the positive reviews, and you’re open for improvement. Last but not least, you’re also not looking at tough work to import them.
The disadvantages of doing this come from not being able to control the reviews one bit. You can encourage your customers to leave reviews on these platforms instead of directly adding their review on your website.
How To Display Customer Reviews On WordPress?
If importing reviews from other platforms isn’t exactly what you want to do, there are various solutions available.
You can either insert a review form in the comments section or simply add feedback widgets or a dedicated page for testimonials.
The benefits you get from this approach is that you have total control over the content of the reviews.
You decide what to approve and what not. It also gives you some control over the answers you provide and how you moderate the questions and the content that shows up on the website. It will also not make you dependent on other social media platforms for getting a review.
There is a downside to this approach. You can get tempted to keep the positive reviews only and get rid of those uncomfortable opinions.
But if you value the product/service you sell, you should take negative reviews just as seriously as you take the good ones.
Customer Review Plugins
You can add customer reviews in WordPress using plugins. There are hundreds of such plugins available, each with different functionality depending on the business you are running.
However, if you don’t want to spend hours testing various plugins, you can just go with these suggestions we put together for you.
Site Reviews
Site reviews come with a free and simple solution to collect customer reviews and display them on the websites. You can add Various forms and reviews via widgets, shortcodes, or blocks.
If you want a text-only, associate a review with a page, image, or a post.
Your readers will submit reviews from the front-end. And you have the ability to approve or trash those reviews.
The author team is very active in this project and updating it regularly. Currently, more than 20,000 WordPress websites are using this plugin.
WP Customer Reviews
This plugin works in a similar way with the one presented above.
You can add to each page or post of your WordPress website a review block. While other more complicated, paid options exist out there, there’s nothing that you may want when talking about website reviews that WP Customer Reviews can’t deliver.
An interesting feature to look forward is they offer support to add custom fields. This gives you more control to the data you collect from your audience.
The plugin was not updated for a while. But, around 50,000+ WordPress blogs are using this plugin.
Trusted Third Parties to Obtain Verified Reviews
We’ve already mentioned that the problem with testimonials and reviews that are published directly on your website often is that customers don’t believe they’re real.
For every online problem, there’s a solution. Trusted third parties appeared to act as the middleman between your company and the customer. They vouch that the reviews left by the customers are real and verified. Sounds too good to be true? Just look it up, there are tens of companies that offer this particular service.
The list of advantages includes being able to guarantee to your visitors that all the reviews are real and trustworthy. You won’t have to worry about collecting the testimonials.
You can get a lot more reviews than just letting your customers leave them on their own. On top of delivering verified reviews, these companies also come with GDPR protection, AFNOR certification, and a moderating space to engage less satisfied customers.
You have increased costs since this service isn’t free. And you should have a leap of faith. Because you need to share some data about your customers and the orders they placed.
Guaranteed reviews and Trustpilot are two of the most notorious companies that offer the services described above.
What Do You Use Instead of Customer Reviews in the B2B Environment?
No matter how efficient customer reviews help B2C companies be more trustworthy and convincing in the selling process when talking about B2B companies, the rules change quite a bit.
You can’t have the same approach since you now need to convince a company that your products and services are worthy of their time and money. Still, you need a whole different structure altogether.
You need to display a photo of the person leaving the testimonial, together with a much more detailed description of their opinion and information about the company they are representing. So, what you need to use in such a situation is a testimonial service.
And, just like with customer reviews, WordPress has plenty of plugins available for this as well.
Strong Testimonials
Strong Testimonials plugin is one of the top ones. They deliver top-notch testimonials and can even double for reviews if you want something more elaborate than the standard review form.
It gives you custom fields for name, company, function, photo, logo, website, and even more. You can integrate with plenty of WordPress themes and easy to use at the same time.
Try Strong Testimonials
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Easy Testimonials
Easy Testimonials plugin is another excellent example of a plugin to get the best results out of testimonials. You can customize them and make them appear as a list, slideshow, or grid, and you can also use shortcodes to display the information you need.
The free version is available in the WordPress repository to download.
The pro version of Easy Testimonials has got more features like
- Testimonials Import / Export
- New Testimonial Notifications
- Testimonial Carousel
- Spam Prevention, etc
Try Easy Testimonials Plugin
Conclusion
We’re hoping that we managed to cover everything you needed to know about how to display customer reviews on the WordPress site.
There are many uses for WordPress. So we needed to be thorough and make sure we cover all grounds so that you have a solution for any situation. Even if we skipped something in the process, we encourage you to use the comments section.
Note: Thomas Glare contributed this guide on How To Show Customer Reviews in WordPress. If you have a new guide to contribute, then check our Guest Blogging Guidelines.
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