Running a business is one of the most tedious feats you can attempt to accomplish in life. First, you need a product or service to sell and someone to sell it to, which can mean countless hours of building, product testing, and getting a website or brick-and-mortar store set up.
Then, after all that, you need to worry about marketing your business so you can actually attract customers and start earning revenue.
Unfortunately, marketing is a multi-step process that can be expensive and cumbersome to set up. It’s easy to overlook, but reviews actually play an important role in a business’ marketing strategy.
In this post, we’re going to take a look at three WordPress review plugins that allow you to import reviews you’ve received from various platforms and showcase them on your WordPress site.
We’ll be taking a look at the features they offer, how easy they are to use, their pricing structures and more.
What are WordPress Review Plugins?
Reviews are an integral part of every marketing strategy, as stated before. They’re part of a micro strategy known as “social proof,” a psychological phenomenon that occurs when an individual makes an assumption about a person, place or thing based on the actions of others.
As consumers, we use reviews as social proof to gauge the quality of a product or business. If reviews are too poor, we won’t bother. If reviews are glowing, we won’t waste time in clicking “Purchase. ”
You can use this to your advantage as you promote your product on your website as well as across the net. By offering a well-made product and/or quality service, you can earn a healthy collection of reviews across multiple platforms, including Google, Facebook and Yelp.
WordPress review plugins allow you to showcase these reviews on your site, giving you the perfect opportunity to provide social proof on your landing pages.
WordPress Review Plugins Featured in This Post
We’re going to go over three WordPress review plugins in this post:
Starfish Reviews
WP Business Reviews
WP Review Slider Pro
These plugins allow you to showcase reviews from such platforms as Google, Facebook, Yelp, and TripAdvisor in different ways.
We’ll be discussing the individual features each plugin offers as well as the settings and styles they use to showcase your reviews. We’ll also be covering their setup processes, how they handle support, and the prices they offer.
We’ve arranged these topics into the following sections:
- Installation & Setup
- Ease of Use
- Support
- Price
Let’s start at the top.
01. Installation & Setup
This may not be something you consider, but if you’re busy running and marketing your business, you probably don’t have time to figure out how to set up every feature and plugin your site needs. That’s why it’s crucial for every plugin you use to have a simple installation and setup process.
Let’s see how each plugin performs in this department.
Starfish Reviews
Installing Starfish Reviews is simple and will be familiar to you if you’ve ever installed a premium WordPress plugin.
After purchasing the plugin, you submit your email address to a form to access the plugin’s ZIP folder along with your API key.
Installing the plugin works the same as any other manual plugin installation from here.
You upload the ZIP folder, install it, then activate it.
Activation takes you to the plugin’s license form immediately, but it’s also pretty easy to find if this doesn’t happen automatically.
The plugin will not work without a valid license activated. Fortunately, you just need to enter the key that was emailed to you, and activate it.
The last part of Starfish Reviews’ setup involves opening WordPress’ permalink settings and clicking Save Changes. The plugin operates via review funnels hosted on their own pages. This step ensures the URL path for funnels is set.
WP Business Reviews
Installing and activating this plugin is simple. All you need to do is upload the ZIP folder or upload the unzipped folder to your Plugins folder. You’ll only need to input your license key after that.
Setting up Google is easy. All you need to do is create a new Places project in Google Cloud Platform and paste your API key in WP Business Reviews.
To connect Facebook, all you need to do is log into your account and give the plugin access to your Facebook page(s).
For Yelp, you’ll need to create an app and paste in your API key. The same goes for Yellow Pages.
WP Review Slider Pro
Setting up WP Review Slider Pro is identical to the way you set up WP Business Reviews—upload the ZIP folder or upload the unzipped folder, activate, and enter your API key.
To connect Google, you’ll need to input your Place ID, which the plugin helps you find.
For Facebook, you’ll need to enter your Secret Access Code, which you can do by giving the plugin access to your pages. You can then import Facebook reviews with a few simple clicks.
All you need to do is enter your business URLs and import your reviews to connect Yelp and TripAdvisor.
02. Ease of Use
In this section, we’re going to examine what it’s like to use each of these plugins as well as which features they include. This should help you decide which plugin would suit your needs best.
Starfish Reviews
Starfish Reviews’ method for retrieving and displaying reviews is automated once you set everything up, which doesn’t take long at all.
Its primary functionality, the one that sets it apart from other options on this list, is to help you generate more reviews for a variety of different platforms, including Google, Facebook and Yelp.
This functionality allows you to create marketing funnels for customer feedback by displaying a specific call to action based on the type of feedback a customer leaves (positive or negative).
For example, you can display a call to action that asks your customer to leave a review on Google if they give a positive response, or showcase your support team’s contact information if they give a negative response.
This part of the plugin is easy to set up, but it’s not the only thing Starfish Reviews can do.
Ease of Use in Displaying Reviews with Starfish Reviews
So, funnels aside, Starfish Reviews’ process for displaying reviews is broken up into a few different features, each of which have their own section within the plugin’s interface.
The Profiles section is where you manage which platforms the plugin should pull reviews from. There are over 10 options to choose from.
Here’s what you’ll need to do to connect the following platforms:
- Google: Enter your Google Place ID or enter a search term that shows your business listing in search results.
- Facebook: Enter your profile’s URL slug.
- Yelp: Enter your profile’s URL slug.
- TripAdvisor: Enter your profile’s URL slug.
You can even disable reviews from a specific platform from appearing on your site without deleting that profile from the Starfish Reviews dashboard entirely.
The Reviews section is where you’ll manage all of the reviews Starfish Reviews has scraped for you.
You can delete individual reviews, delete reviews in bulk and even hide specific reviews while still keeping them in the dashboard.
The Collections section is where you’ll be as far as displaying reviews goes.
You can define specific rules and styles for each collection, then display it anywhere shortcodes are accepted.
These settings are easy to configure. They’re even arranged in different sections so the UI appears cleaner and the settings feel easier to manage.
The Filters section is where you can define which profile(s) to pull reviews from, the minimum rating each review should have, a maximum number of reviews to display and the age of reviews.
In the Layouts section, you can control the number of columns and rows your collection should have as well as choose if you want to enable the slider functionality.
The Elements section contains a checklist of review parts you can enable or disable. They include titles, avatars, ratings, dates, names, source icons and more.
For Styles, choose between light, dark and transparent styles, different avatar sizes, and positions.
Once you’re done creating your collection, access its shortcode and embed code from the edit page, or access just the shortcode from the central Collections page.
WP Business Reviews
Using WP Business Reviews is relatively straightforward once you have everything set up. You can add reviews manually for some platforms or import them when you create collections. You’ll use collections to group individual reviews together so you can display them on your website.
You can configure style settings for collections, control which parts of a review get displayed and even filter out certain reviews, such as low-star reviews. You’ll use a shortcode or the included widget to display collections.
You can also create Review Tags to apply to single reviews you add manually and use them to create custom collections not linked to any particular platform.
Before we talk about the features WP Review Slider Pro offers, I wanted to point out that WP Business Reviews only recently launched at the time this review was written. The developers will likely add more features as the product grows.
WP Review Slider Pro
WP Review Slider Pro is just as easy to use, but it comes with a lot more features when it comes to displaying reviews. In fact, the screenshot displayed above only shows a third of the settings for creating templates.
You’ll use templates to create collections of reviews to display, and unlike WP Business Reviews, you can add reviews from multiple platforms without needing to create them manually.
Also, despite this plugin having the word “slider” in its name, you don’t need to create a slider.
There are multiple styles to choose from, and you can customize the colors you use, what gets displayed, whether or not you use a slider, how slides behave, what gets filtered, and more. You can also create a badge, a summary of the number of reviews your business has received and the average star rating it has.
There’s also a form template you can use to have visitors leave reviews on your site. Templates, badges and forms can all be exported and imported from site to site.
03. Support
Support is a major deciding factor for many users, especially busy business owners who don’t have the time or knowledge to fix bugs on their own. Let’s take a look at the various levels of support these plugins offer.
Starfish Reviews
If you need support for Starfish Reviews, simply fill out the support contact form.
Premium users receive priority support.
There’s also a Facebook group, extensive documentation, and a Feature Request area you can use to request and vote on new features.
WP Business Reviews
WP Business Reviews offers standard ticket support to every customer, but higher-tiered customers receive access to priority support.
They also have extensive documentation.
WP Review Slider Pro
WP Review Slider Pro falls a bit flat in this department. They do offer support, but there’s no difference in the level of support offered to non-customers and customers. You’ll use the same contact form, and there’s no priority support given to higher-tiered customers.
There’s also no documentation you can reference, though there are a few helpful articles in the company’s blog, including an article on creating an API key for Google.
04. Price
Starfish Reviews
Pricing for Starfish Reviews premium starts at $47/month or $444/year, a $120 discount year after year.
This plan includes:
- 1 site license
- 5 review profiles
- 5 funnels
- 5 collections
All plans are backed by a 30-day, money-back guarantee.
There’s also a lite version available through the official WordPress plugin repository.
WP Business Reviews
WP Business Reviews has three premium plans. The first plan gives you access to a single site license in addition to the following:
- One year of updates.
- All review platforms.
- All styles.
- Custom reviews.
- Filters for negative reviews.
- Email support.
This plan is available at a rate of $99/year.
WP Review Slider Pro
WP Review Slider is a freemium plugin.
All plans come with the same set of features. You simply pay for the number of site licenses you need with the following price structures:
- 1 Site – $29/Year or $99/Lifetime
- 5 Sites – $59/Year or $199/Lifetime
- 50 Sites – $149/Year or $449/Lifetime
There’s also a 7-day, free trial you can take advantage of.
Final Thoughts
Starfish Reviews, WP Business Reviews and WP Review Slider Pro are three plugins that display reviews from similar platforms in different ways. They all have their strengths and weaknesses.
Whichever one you decide to go with is entirely up to you and the needs or your business. Think of the points we brought up in each section in this article, and consider how they relate to you and your business’ needs.
All of these plugins are easy to install and set up, so it’s best to consider their features, ease of use, support options and prices.
Of course, in order to display reviews from multiple platforms, you need to actually have reviews on those platforms.
If you don’t have any reviews or need more, choose Starfish Reviews. It helps you get more 5-star reviews for your business.
We hope you found this article helpful, and if you have any experience with any of these plugins or know of a few similar ones, be sure to chime off in the comments below.
If you are looking for a free reviews plugin specifically for local business websites that helps you get stars under your Google results please consider “Simple Reviews Widget” for your article. Check my name on my comment for the link.