Want to let your visitors leave reviews on your WordPress site? Maybe you’re looking to boost your social proof with reviews of your own products. Or maybe you just want to add some third-party voices to your own product reviews. No matter what you’re trying to accomplish, this list of the best customer reviews plugins can help you out.
Why You Should Accept Customer Reviews
Whether you’re accepting reviews for your own products or products you yourself have reviewed, unbiased third-party opinions will make your content seem more trustworthy.
According to a 2014 survey from Bright Local, 88% of consumers say they trust online reviews just as much as they trust the personal recommendations they receive in real life.
That means that for most people, that honest review they read on your website is just as effective as the review their friend gave them over dinner.
As I mentioned, there are two ways you can accept customer reviews on your WordPress site:
- For your own products. Hopefully in the form of a positive testimonial.
- As third-party opinions to add to your own product reviews.
I’ll cover plugins which can help you with both types of customer reviews, focusing slightly more on the former use.
What to Look for in a Customer Reviews Plugin
There are a few features you’ll absolutely want to look for when choosing a customer review plugin. If the plugin you choose is missing one of these features, you should think long and hard whether the rest of the features outweigh the loss:
- Approval System – it’s a good idea to manually check all reviews before they go live, so you definitely want a plugin with some type of approval system.
- Schema markup – schema markup gets you those cool “star” rich snippets in organic search results. They can increase your organic CTR, so you definitely want them included in the plugin you choose.
- Rating System – are you ok with one overall star ranking or do you want customers to be able to review based on individual criteria? Make sure the plugin offers your desired review system.
For this list, I’ll try to find plugins that meet as many of those criteria as possible.
With that out of the way, let’s take a deeper look at some of the best customer reviews plugin.
Best Customer Reviews Plugins for Your Own Products
If you want to let your customers review your own products, these are the plugins for you. If you’re exclusively looking to gather testimonials, you might want to check out our list of testimonial plugins.
WP Customer Reviews
WP Customer Reviews is a free plugin that hits all the points I listed above. You can moderate comments, add schema markup, and customize which review fields you include. Reviewers can leave their review from the front-end. Then, you can manipulate those reviews on the backend using shortcodes.
If you want to collect and display customer reviews on your own products, WP Customer Reviews is probably the best overall option.
Key Features:
- Readers can submit reviews from the front-end
- Moderate reviews before displaying them publicly
- Add multiple rich schema markup types
- Customize the review form fields
Price: Free | More Information
Rich Reviews
Rich Reviews is another free plugin that helps you both collect and showcase reviews from your customers. It also adds schema markup for rich snippets and allows you to moderate any customer reviews before you display them on your website.
The aesthetics aren’t quite on par with WP Customer Reviews, but other than that it has a similar feature set.
Key Features:
- Collect customer reviews via a front-end form
- Moderate reviews before posting them publicly
- Add proper schema.org markup for Google rich snippets
- Insert reviews anywhere using shortcodes
Price: Free | More Information
Comment Rating Field Plugin
The free version of Comment Rating Field Plugin is very simple – it adds a 5-star rating field to the end of your comment form. With it, customers can add a rating with every comment they submit. Helpful, but nothing special.
To really unlock the plugin, you need to go Pro. In the pro version, you can add rating criteria, choose schema markup for rich snippets, add the rating field to custom post types, and lots more.
Key Features:
- Add a rating field to your comments
- Choose from schema markup (pro version)
- Add multiple rating criteria (pro version)
- Use on any custom post type (pro version)
- Integrate with WooCommerce (pro version)
Price: Free (Pro version starts at $39) | More Information
Google Places Reviews
If you’re running a local business, you might already have a stash of reviews that you can add to your website. Basically, Google Places Reviews helps you add reviews from Google Places to your own website via a handy widget.
Key Features:
- Showcase up to 3 reviews per location
- Show reviews for your own business or other local businesses
- Choose from multiple themes
- Includes Google Places autocomplete if you want to allow customers to search
Price: Free (pro version starts at $45) | More Information
POWr Reviews
POWr Reviews helps you both collect and display customer reviews on your WordPress site. To collect reviews, POWr lets your customers submit a review via a front-end comment form.
Then, on the back-end, you can automatically display reviews using a shortcode. The only downside is that you will need to create a free POWr account to use the plugin.
There’s also a pro version which allows more functionality. You’ll need the pro version if you want to moderate reviews before they display, which is a bit of a negative.
Key Features:
- Collect customer reviews via a front-end form
- Automatically display reviews via shortcode
- Customize style and fonts
- Manually approve comments (pro version only)
Price: Free (pro starts at $3.19 per month) | More Information
Best Customer Reviews Plugins for Third-Party Products
If, on the other hand, you’re more looking to bring in third-party viewpoints to your own product reviews, then these plugins might be more suited to your needs.
WP Review
WP Review is a free plugin designed to help you create aesthetic reviews of third-party products. But as part of the plugin, it also allows users to submit their own reviews. You can then choose whether or not to display those reviews below your own review.
All reviews are also marked up with proper schema.org markup to get Google rich snippets.
Key Features:
- Stars, percentage, and points rating systems
- Supports schema markup
- Can add custom fields
Price: Free | More Information
WP Product Review Lite
WP Product Review Lite is another free option that helps you both create well-styled personal reviews, as well as accept reviews from other customers. If you enable user reviews, your readers can add their own reviews using custom criteria that you specify.
Key Features:
- Rate products using your own set of criteria
- Include an aesthetic review box at the top of your post
- Allows user reviews via comments
Price: Free | More Information
Wrapping Things Up
There are plenty of great reviews plugins that help you create your own product reviews, but I really wanted to drill down to only those plugins that allow your visitors to leave reviews, whether that be for your own products or third-party products.
As long as they’re natural and (hopefully) positive, third-party reviews will boost your social proof and make you seem more trustworthy.
Have you incorporated customer reviews into your website? If so, what effect did they have on your site?
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