The Site Reviews WordPress plugin allows website owners to collect and display reviews with a 1 to 5 star rating. With more than 40,000 active installations, I consider it to be one of the best plugins in this category.
The plugin can be installed from the WordPress Dashboard. Search for Site Reviews.
When you activate the plugin for the first time, you will see a welcome page with a getting started video and other information.
There is also a new section in the Dashboard called Site Reviews. Let’s start with the Settings page.
For a free plugin, there’s a lot of available options. Every option has a helpful explanation. Take a few minutes to explore them, even though most default values are fine.
The difference between this plugin and other Testimonial plugins is that reviews can be assigned not just to a category, but also to a page or a post. But let’s take it one step at a time.
Reviews on a Food Recipes Blog
Imagine that you have a blog with food recipes (Nutmeg Plus Theme is used in the tutorial). It might be a good idea to collect reviews for your recipes.
Edit a recipe post and add the Submit a Review block. I will assign reviews to The Current Page.
To make this form stand out, you can select this block, click on the three dots and Group it. Then you will be able to add a custom background color, which makes it a lot more visible. I will also add a custom heading.
Update the post and view your recipe.
Let’s add a sample review and refresh the page. Nothing changed because I haven’t added yet the block that displays the reviews. Go back to the edit page.
I will add the Latest Reviews block at the top of my Group block followed by a separator block. I will limit the reviews to the current page. Click on Update. You can now see my review.
And finally, you can add the Rating Summary block here or anywhere else on the page. Again limit the reviews to The Current page. There’s also the useful option to Hide this block if there are no reviews.
Reviews Block as a Reusable Block
If you decide to use this plugin to collect reviews on multiple posts and pages, similar to what I’m doing here, then all these steps take too much work. Thankfully there’s a very convenient solution.
When you’re happy with the structure of your Reviews section, you can convert your Group of blocks into a Reusable Block.
If you don’t know Reusable Blocks are (What are Reusable Blocks?), I have a short but very detailed video about this amazing but lesser-known WordPress feature.
Once you have this new Reusable Block, you can quickly add it to other posts and pages.
Simply click on the Plus sign to add a new block, open the Reusable tab and click on it. It will be added with all the same blocks and block settings.
Collect & Display Testimonials
Of course you can use this plugin to collect customer testimonials. In that case you can create a new page and drop all these 3 blocks on that one page.
You don’t even have to add the Submit a Review block and just manually add your reviews from other channels.
Reviews as Widgets (Classic and Block-based)
These 3 blocks are also available as Widgets, both as Classic Widgets and as Block-based widgets.
Another nice feature is the ability to respond to reviews. Open the All Reviews page and find the Respond action under each review.
Responses will show up under the original review.
If you don’t like this heading above your responses, you can change it to something else in Settings in the Strings tab. Search for the string that you want to change. Click on it and then provide a Custom Text.
You can do the same thing with other strings too, like this string about the review being based on experience.
Everything that I’ve shown so far is available in the free version of the plugin. The premium version is quite expensive, even though it promises many great features.
To be honest I’m quite impressed by the quality of this free plugin. I’m glad that I found out about it and will keep it in mind for my future projects.
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