The Strong Testimonials plugin allows you to collect and display testimonials or reviews on your WordPress website. With more than 100,000 active installations, it is the most popular plugin in this category.
The plugin can be installed from the WordPress Dashboard. Search for Strong Testimonials.
When you activate the plugin for the first time, you will see this page with a link to the getting started guide and a promo for the paid version. You will also see a new Testimonials section in the Dashboard.
Plugin Settings
Let’s start with the Settings page.
One fantastic option that I’ve never seen before is the ability to disable all upsells. Tick this checkbox and save the changes to make all upsells disappear from the Dashboard.
I wish all WordPress plugins would provide something like this.
Submit a Testimonial Form
If you want to collect testimonials from your website visitors, open the Form page and create a form. You can add, edit and remove form fields. In the Settings page for your Form, you can change a few things.
Take a look at the Form Actions section. You can redirect the visitor on a successful submission, you can change the default status of submissions and enable email notifications.
Now that we have our Form ready, go to the Views page and create a New One. Select the Form mode and give it a title.
Display Testimonials
I’ll use all default values in the Style section and click on Save Changes.
Now I have the Shortcode that will display my form. I’ll save it to the Clipboard.
I’ll create a new page only for collecting testimonials.
I can add a Shortcode block and paste the shortcode from the previous page. After publishing my page, I can see the testimonial submission form (using the Leonardo Hotel WordPress theme).
The second option is to use the Strong Testimonial View block. In it I can select my Form view.
The result is exactly the same, though the second option is a bit more intuitive and has a direct Edit Settings button.
I’ll submit two new testimonials in order to proceed with the next steps.
New testimonials appear in the Dashboard. By default they will have a Pending status. You can publish them by changing their status from Pending Review to Published.
I wish there was a separate link to Approve without having to click multiple times.
Now let’s display our testimonials.
Go to the Views page again and Add a New one.
This time select the Display mode. Look through all the available options and change what you need.
The Style section provides multiple templates and layouts. I’ll use the Default template and the Normal layout. There’s a quick preview of what the different layouts mean.
I will create a new page to display my testimonials, but it is also possible to do that on the same page as the one with our testimonial form.
Add the Strong Testimonial Block again and select the Display Testimonials view.
Publish and open the page. Try out some of the other templates and layouts, which you can customize even more with some custom CSS code.
Display Testimonials as a Slideshow
You can display your testimonials as a slideshow too. You can create a new View for that or edit an existing one.
Change the mode from Display to Slideshow and look at the options in the new Slideshow section.
It is probably best to enable slideshow Controls and/or pagination. Let’s enable both options.
I will also enable Continuous Sliding and reduce the animation duration.
Save changes and refresh the Testimonials page. The arrows are your Controls and these circles are the pagination (using the Foundation WordPress theme).
Testimonials Widget
You can display your Testimonials as a widget too, if your WordPress theme has a good location for that.
Open the Widgets page in the Appearance section. Select a widgetized area and add the Strong Testimonials block.
You will probably have to try out multiple templates and layouts to find the one that better matches your theme.
Plugin Performance
And finally let’s talk about plugin performance. What I greatly appreciate about this plugin is that it loads its assets only on pages where they are needed.
If you decide to display your testimonials on a separate page, then the plugin will load the CSS and JavaScript files only on this one page.
I have reviewed 3 more popular plugins in this category, and this plugin is the only one doing this thing right. I think it’s worth mentioning.
Even though this plugin comes with a paid version, the free version will be more than enough for many WordPress users.
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