A guide to choosing the best WordPress Rating Plugin

The world is moving, as we are. Everyone is too busy nowadays. Between work, studying, exercise, family, and all kinds of activities, we don’t have much time to take decisions while purchasing a product or watching movies. That’s why most of us go through online ratings & reviews to make the process easier.

With the emergence of the internet around the world, online platforms like e-commerce stores and blog sites are also blooming. Now users and customers can share their experiences by clicking on stars and their thoughts with some worlds. While talking about online platforms, WordPress is clearly dominating this arena, According to W3Techs, WordPress powers 43% of all the websites on the Internet, in other words, WordPress powers over one-third of the web! 

Now, if you are a part of this web world, means you have a WordPress site, If you want to increase traffic to your WordPress site, boost your SEO and more user engagement on your blogging site, or bring in more sales from your WooCommerce products, you will benefit from installing a WordPress rating plugin on your website. In this article, we will show how you can choose a rating plugin for your WordPress site which will be the best fit.

What are customer/user ratings and reviews in WordPress?

WordPress does not have a built-in star rating feature, but you can easily add this with a WordPress plugin. A rating system is a quantitative system that is represented by symbols like stars/ like-dislike, that are used to judge the quality of things like articles, products, services, etc. User reviews will accompany the ratings to elaborate on how and why they have a positive, negative, or neutral opinion.

Not all user rating systems are the same and different purposes require different user ratings, based on your WordPress site, you have the freedom to choose the rating type using plugins. 

How do ratings create an impact on your business?

There are many similar products, services, and content on WooCommerce stores and WordPress blog sites, but ratings and reviews can make them stand out from the competition. With ratings and reviews, product or service-based WordPress sites, help visitors make an informed purchasing decision, whereas readers can easily identify the most popular content based on ratings on a content-rich blog site.

Think of yourself as a customer, last time when you purchased a headphone from an online store what you did do before buying? You may be asked your friends about that headphone, and also checked the rating of that product by previous customers. According to  Invesp, 90% of consumers read online reviews before making a purchase and 72% of the consumers will be prompted to take an action after reading positive reviews.

Brands will obviously try to highlight every feature of the product in the best way possible, but it is the customers who will give honest feedback on the product. Here, ratings and reviews become even more important in the absence of the ability to ‘trial’ products prior to purchasing online. When a customer leaves a review for the product, he is helping others understand what they can expect from the product, how is it performing, and what are its advantages and flaws. 

A survey conducted by Bazaarvoice, shows that the majority (88%) of customers use reviews to discover and evaluate products. From food and beverage and apparel to health and beauty and hardware to everything in between, ratings and reviews play a crucial role in the buying process.

What to look for in the perfect WordPress rating plugin?

There is plenty of WordPress rating plugins to explore, but choosing the best one can be tricky. Some of the plugins have different functionality, some plugins have similar features among them. Based on your WordPress site and your business types, rating plugins choice may differ. Let’s explore some specific features that you should consider while selecting a rating plugin.

Rating based on criteria:

Ratings can be called the universal language, no matter what language, font size, or font color your site uses, consumers can recognize and understand a rating system. With this rating system, consumers are also able to see what other users/readers think of your product or content at a glance.

Now you can offer your customers to give ratings and reviews in easy and different ways, like getting reviews based on different criteria. For example, if you have an online store, and you allow to collect ratings on price, quality, delivery, etc with specific statistics of those criteria, It could help both ways for a customer and store owner. Say, a product has a good rating in terms of price & quality, but the delivery time is not satisfactory. So now other customers will get an idea about this and also based on this feedback, the store owner can take necessary action where he needs to.

Automated review reminder email:

In this competitive business world, the power of personalization plays a vital role in your business growth. Now in this scenario, how can you personalize your review requests, well, a review reminder email is a tool in this personal communication. Usually, a customer gives a rating or review after or during the use of the product. Now, in his busy life, he may forget to share the good experience of that product. By using an automated reminder email from a plugin, you can send it to your specific customer to give a product review. 

Options for uploading visual content  (Photo & video) with rating:

Reviews with photos can give a genuine experience to the customer, or a quick video about the product just from his mobile can make the review more realistic. Photo & Video can be particularly helpful to your new customers, as they show what the product looks like in real life.

Make the review more trustworthy with verified badges:

If you have an e-commerce store,  where you’re trying to build a brand. Trust is a key point of your brand building. If your customers think that your store has fake reviews, that may cause a negative impact on your business growth. A verified purchase badge can isolate the real customer from others. The verified badge is given to that product review that is purchased from that store.

Studies show that more than 60% of customers don’t purchase simply because no verified badges are visible in the store. Verified badges are a simple symbol reassuring the customer they’re heading in the right direction, giving them a sense of trust.

Admin notification & reply to review option:

Responding to every review and also habitually thanking every reviewer is a very good practice for business. According to  Review Tracker survey, 53% of customers expect businesses to respond to reviews within a week. 1 in 3 has a shorter time frame of 3 days or less.

For your WordPress site, rating with reviews can be a platform for customers to share their experiences not only with fellow consumers but with your businesses. How you respond to these reviews can have just as much impact on your brand reputation.

Your time is valuable, and so is your customers, so make sure you’re responding to your customers with thanks to your customers for their review. A notification to your mail inbox for a new review will be very useful, for a quick response to your customer’s reviews.

A clean dashboard for viewing and moderating the reviews that come in:

 Your eCommerce store or WordPress site may have thousands of reviews, and if a WordPress rating plugin has the option where, all review information is displayed in brief with the search, edit, delete option that will be a great feature for site owners.

By analyzing statistics from the dashboard, if you are a store owner, you can understand the behavior of the customer about the products in your store. Again a WordPress blog site owner can set rules for review approval for the site administrators or customer service team. If the review is libelous or uses obscene language, they can moderate or block it. 

Review import-export feature:

Earning ratings is a hard job for a store owner. Now for some valid reason if you want to migrate your site from one to another, then you don’t want to lose these valuable ratings, the ratings and reviews import feature is helpful when you’d like to migrate reviews and ratings from one WordPress site to another. While choosing the best WordPress rating plugin, you should check which plugin offers ratings and reviews the import-export option in an efficient and quick-mannered way.

Provide valuable SEO insights:

As a site owner, you must want to make your WordPress site search engine friendly. A WordPress rating plugin can help you rank higher on search engines through schema markup. If your customer rate a certain item on your site using a review plugin, this information will serve more context to search engines, thus making it more SEO -friendly.

As per the Brightedge survey, 53% of all trackable website traffic comes from organic search, marketers would be wise to capture some of that and share it with customer reviews. By leaving customer reviews on your site, your customers are helping Google better understand what your WordPress site is all about. This is free keyword-dense content creation that has the potential to significantly affect your website’s SEO.

Flexibility in design using custom addons for popular page builders:

WordPress page builder can be called an impressive addition to WordPress that turned designing into a more visual procedure. The page builder is a choice that gives you the freedom and flexibility to design your WordPress site based on user experience.

Now while selecting a WordPress rating plugin, you should consider which plugin provides custom elements of the review section of a page builder. The right rating plugin with addons of page builders will save your time of creating pages from scratch, give you the flexibility to design the page, and make it more acceptable and user-friendly.

Options for displaying reviews on your website’s other pages:

Your WordPress site is considered your digital storefront, so making a good first impression is imperative. Showcasing customer reviews on your website should attract attention and increase time on staying on your site. So, to display your collected ratings and reviews on other locations of your site,  in addition to the product or blog page, shortcodes, and widgets can be options. By using shortcodes, you can properly highlight reviews without seeming too overbearing, yet leveraging their influence and SEO value.

Coupon for review:

Coupons encourage your customers to write product reviews. Offering coupons for review is a great way to turn your customers into repeat customers, now if your WordPress rating plugin has the feature, it will give you that advantage.

In such a scenario once your customer leaves a review, the system will automatically send an email with a discount coupon code. It will Increase your review numbers and engage your customers, drive repeat purchases, up-sells, and new sales.

The 10 best WordPress rating plugins in 2022

Now we got an overall picture of the importance of the WordPress rating plugins, and also features should have a plugin to serve the best purpose for your business. Let’s explore some top plugins, and here we focus on the plugin features and the use case of that plugin.

1.  ReviewX

ReviewX accelerates the store’s credibility and revenue by getting authentic reviews from customers with different review criteria, photo, and video attachments. Automated review reminder emails, review imports from other platforms, a clean and modern dashboard with analytics for viewing and moderating the reviews, custom widgets for popular WordPress page builders, etc have all been included to make ReviewX a business-driven review solution for the WordPress ecosystem.

By achieving 10K+ active installations & more than 240K downloads within this competitive WordPress review ecosystem, ReviewX has already acquired a position through its features that are particularly noteworthy. A good user experience and positive reception of ReviewX for its clean design and functionality are reflected in the 30+ five-star reviews on the WordPress repository.

Features: 

• Multi-Criteria review: The ability to write reviews based on different criteria by your customers.
• Review Reminder email with advanced filter: Sends out automated review reminder emails to customers who have recently bought but haven’t posted a review on the product yet.
• Reviews & star rating import option from another platform.
• Manual review addition with review and rating editing feature by the store owner.
• Options for uploading more visual content, such as pictures or videos.
• By showing verified badges it ensures that reviews are given by real shoppers.
• A clean dashboard for viewing and moderating the reviews that come in.
• Custom widgets for popular page builders, Elementor, Divi Builder, and Oxygen Builder.
• Display review location with country flag.

Best fit for: 

 If you are an online store owner that is powered by WooCommerce, specialized features from ReviewX like criteria-based ratings,  automated review reminder emails with multi-layered filter options, review import-export etc will take you clearly ahead in this online business race.

A WordPress blog site, or a review site owner who wants to reach more visitors, design the review section with more flexibility, then rich snippets, custom addons for popular page builders, these such excellent features of ReviewX will be a perfect solution for you. 

2. Site Reviews:

Site Reviews is a versatile plugin that works for products, services, and any other scenario in your site where you want customers to submit reviews. The plugin has several options for displaying your reviews, including shortcodes, widgets, and blocks. You can pin your best reviews so that they are always shown first, require approval before new review submissions are published, require visitors to be logged-in in order to write a review, send custom notifications on a new submission, and more.

Features:

• Request users to log in to leave reviews.
• Prioritize displaying reviews with high ratings.
• Custom notifications are available for when a review is posted.
• To display reviews several widgets, blocks, and shortcodes can be used.
• Block domains that contain specific words, phrases, IP addresses, names, and emails from submitting reviews on your website.
• Rich snippets show up on your search engine results with ratings and stars.

Best use case:

•  Flexibility to display reviews anywhere on your site using their widgets, shortcodes, blocks.
•  The export or import reviews feature helps you not to be tucked on one WordPress site.
•  Sort and search reviews and custom review form building can be done with their free and premium addon.

3. Widgets for Google review

Widgets for Google Reviews lets you display Google reviews using predesigned widgets. Consumers often make purchase decisions on the back of Google reviews, with Google reviews WordPress plugin, you can easily display customer feedback on your business website. Google reviews WordPress plugin is free and supports the display of 10 Google reviews. Widgets for Google reviews are integrated with shortcodes, so you can manage the review widgets easily without dealing with code. A website that has this Google review widgets plugin can display reviews from different platforms, such as Facebook, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Google, and Amazon. 

Features:

• In the free version, display up to 10 Google Reviews 40+ Widget layouts
• All your reviews will be stored in a WordPress database.
• Display reviews from different platforms (Google, Facebook, Yelp, Amazon, Tripadvisor) in a widget.
• Review shortening and review edit options.
• The automated review invitation system

Best fit for:

•   A website that has this Google review widgets plugin can display reviews from different platforms, such as Facebook, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Google, and Amazon.
• The more reviews you have, the more prominent your business will become in a Google search, meaning more consumers will consider using your services.

4. WP Customer review

WP Customer Reviews is a highly-customizable and lightweight plugin that allows you to set up a specific page on your blog to receive customer testimonials for your business/service OR to write reviews about a product. With this plugin, you can set up a simple form that allows users to submit reviews on the front-end of your site. Submitted reviews are displayed in the backend in a clean dashboard, you can publish them or set them to private.

Features:

• Shortcodes are available for you to place your reviews on several areas of your site, including sidebars
• All review submissions get moderated in the WordPress dashboard.
• Compatible with WP Multisite and Multiuser.
• Option to respond to all reviews that come in from customers by admin.
• Rich snippets are shown to the search engines to improve your results
• Completely customizable, including which fields to ask for, require, and show.

Best fit for:

This plugin supports both Business and Product review types, any business owner with a WordPress website looking for a simple review system can be the best choice for him.

5. WP Ultimate Review

This WP Ultimate Review plugin helps you to interact with your users with improved blog comments. visitors submit reviews for different posts products, events or anything can write reviews. You get multiple style choices that you can set up for your customers to give their feedback on your website. Along with the display, you also get to control who can review and only display the review that the admin approves.

Features:

• Review Score Styles options like point, start, percentage, and pie chart.
• WooCommerceGlobal reviews on your blog, page, and custom post type like the product page
• Can set admin approval required for reviews
• Restrict review option only for the registered users.
• Notification to multiple email addresses with new review submissions.

Best fit for:

Owners of WordPress websites mainly blogs, service can use this free plugin. This plugin will provide a good-looking review form for customers to rate and share their opinion. With the different score styles of ratings and statistics, this plugin can attract new visitors.

6. Customer Review for WooCommerce

As the name said, Customer Reviews for WooCommerce is a review plugin specifically built for WooCommerce stores. if you have a WooCommerce store and want to attract more reviews from your customers and display those reviews in a way to boost social proof, then this one is definitely a great option to consider. You can then send an automated email with a coupon to thank the customer for submitting a review. 

Features: 

• All reviews can be filtered based on ratings and other criteria
• Aggregate review form that lets shoppers review multiple products from a single form
• Option to let customers attach pictures to their reviews.
• Integrate your reviews with Google Shopping to reveal star ratings on search results.
• Review import & export feature.

Best fit for:

If you have a WooCommerce store, this review plugin is only meant for online stores. With its automated reminder email, review with trust badges, discount coupon for review, etc such rich features makes this plugin a good choice for store owners.

7. Schema – All In One Schema Rich Snippets

 Providing rich snippets for your products on search engines is the prime feature of the Schema plugin. By using the review schema markup of this WordPress review plugin, and adding visuals for the search engines you can show your product review on the search results and rank upper of your website.

Features:

• Offers multiple schema types such as Reviews, Events, Recipes, Articles, Products, Services, etc
• The most important and relevant information is also shown when customers attempt to share a link on their Facebook page.
• It gives search engines only the important & precise information to display in search result snippets.
• A lightweight plugin that doesn’t slow down your site 

Best fit for:

If you want to boost your WordPress site on search engine rankings, or you don’t want to use any other rich snippets plugins, then you can choose this WordPress review plugin to rank better at the search engine’s result pages and get more customers. 

8. WP Review Slider:

This plugin is a great way to boost customer confidence with Social Proof from Facebook and Twitter!  WP Review Slider uses the official Facebook and Twitter APIs, unlike other similar plugins that use illegal crawling/scraping methods to download reviews. The plugin can also help you search Twitter for positive comments about your business and display them in review format on your site. You can also choose the number of reviews to display.

Features:

• Display Facebook & Twitter reviews in WordPress in a nice slider format.
• Create multiple templates to use on your Posts, Pages, & Widget areas.
• Display them using a shortcode, template function, or use our widget.
• Template display options like show/hide star rating, show/hide date, border radius, background, and text colors.
• Choose how many reviews to display per row and even have multiple rows.

Best fit for: 

If your WordPress site has a Facebook page and Twitter page and you use it to collect reviews, then WP Review Slider might be the best review plugin for you. This plugin allows you to display these reviews in slider format, using shortcodes.

9. Photo review for WooCommerce

Photo Reviews for WooCommerce is a powerful review plugin for WooCommerce which helps you send review reminder emails and sends thank you emails with WooCommerce coupons to customers. This plugin allows customers to post reviews with images. This will helps to improve your social proof, and also aware your new customers regarding the exact view of your product. 

Features:

• Allows customers posting reviews including product pictures.
• Send review reminder emails asking customers to review their purchased products.
• Send thank you email with a coupon code when a customer review is published.
• Option to edit customer’s review (text and images) by the admin.
• Option to filter your reviews based on verified purchases, ratings, and much more.

Best fit for:

if you run an online store and would like to have photos in your customer reviews, the WooCommerce Photo Reviews plugin can be a good solution. As they have review reminder email, and thank you email with coupons, these rich features will help you to grab new customers also. 

10. Strong Testimonial:

Strong testimonial is the WordPress plugin for collecting, managing and displaying testimonials or reviews. It enables you to set up customizable review submission forms, where you can add custom fields and re-arrange existing ones according to your needs. In addition, the plugin comes with an editor that lets you configure precisely what testimonials you want to include and in which order.

Features:

•  Strong Testimonials offers both shortcode and widget placements. 
•  Provide multiple pre-built designs for reviews.
• Customizable review submission form.
• Selective testimonials can be displayed on your site.

Best fit for:

If you have an agency or service-providing WordPress site, then the strong testimonial plugin is a good fit for you. They provide review form customization options, and multiple pre-built reviews so that you can match your website branding exactly the way you want.

Conclusion: 

Displaying ratings and reviews from customers/ visitors on your WordPress site is great for marketing and establishing trust with your audience. So, you need a good strategy to choose a review plugin that is going to work seamlessly on your WordPress website. Along with the plugin-rich features which were discussed above, you also need also keep in mind the plugin review, active installations, and compatibility with the latest version of WordPress.