On the face of it, there are two ways to start a review site on WordPress:
- Do everything the hard way, writing out your reviews, using static images to display your star ratings, and watching as all your hard work becomes lost in a sea of similar reviews in Google’s organic search results.
Or:
- Choose from one of the best review plugins for WordPress review sites, install it on your website, and use it to create rich, dynamic reviews that not only look great on your site but which also stand out from the crowd in Google search results thanks to rich snippets.
If you’re anything like us, you’ll no doubt agree that option number 2 is the way to go.
That’s why we’ve recently put scores of the most popular plugins to the test and come up with our top ten picks of the very best review plugins currently available.
Below, we’ll list our favorite free and premium tools, outline their key features, and explain why they may be just the thing to help you make your new review site a success.
Top Ten Best Review Plugins for WordPress Review Sites in 2020
1. WP Review Pro
Pitched by its creators at MyThemeShop as an all-in-one solution for creating a WordPress review website, WP Review Pro does live up to the hype.
Packed into one reasonably-priced package, you’ll find more useful features than just about any other tool on this list.
First up, there are 19 different kinds of rich snippets, one for just about every type of review site imaginable. So, whether you’re reviewing anything from movies, books, and video games to travel hotspots, restaurants, and works of art, you’ll be perfectly equipped to ensure your reviews feature prominently in Google search results.
And if you don’t see a tailor-made snippet for your niche? Don’t worry; WP Review Pro also offers 16 customizable templates so that you tweak your reviews to match your website branding better and attract your target audience.
Elsewhere, you’ll find a plethora of helpful features including:
- Multiple rating systems including stars, percentages, thumbs up or down, pie charts and more
- User reviews and comments
- Integration with Google Places, Yelp, and Facebook so you can display reviews from those platforms on your website.
- Comparison charts
- Popup and notification bars
- WooCommerce integration.
As with all useful plugins, this one is highly intuitive and doesn’t take long to learn, which is just another in a long list of reasons it deserves the top spot in today’s guide.
At the time of writing, WP Review Pro costs $67 for a single site license, $87 for three sites, and $97 for unlimited websites.
A free version is also available, albeit with limited features such as a single rich snippet and only two pre-designed templates.
2. StarCat Reviews
Relatively new on our radar, StarCart Reviews has already made a big impression in a short space of time.
A reliable alternative to WP Review Pro, this all-in-one review plugin offers a dynamic and attractive modern rating system that can be tweaked and fine-tuned to match both your branding and the kind of products you’re viewing.
Each review can contain multiple sections, so as well as adding your thoughts and opinions, you can also include pros and cons and star ratings. There’s also the ability to add vital statistical information so that your readers can learn everything they might need to know about the product you’re reviewing.
If you’re focussing on laptop computers, for example, these stats could include battery life, graphics, and memory. In contrast, a movie reviewer can use it to list the genre, director, and other vital information.
If there’s one thing we like the most about StarCat, it’s that the plugin is truly designed with the end-user in mind. Along with comprehensive reviews, users can also add their reviews, reply to others, and upvote the reviews they find the most helpful.
For you, as a website owner, you’ll find the WooCommerce integration and review schema markup for better Google rankings invaluable.
At the time of writing, the plugin’s developers were also working on several useful add-ons to allow for photo-based reviews, comparison tables, and more.
Available with a seven-day free trial, StarCat Reviews costs just $39 for a year’s use. This means that although it requires a smaller initial investment to get started, you may end up spending more over several years than you would with a fixed-price plugin.
3. Customer Reviews for WooCommerce
The first free WordPress review plugin to feature in today’s guide, Customer Reviews for WooCommerce, is designed to help you increase sales on your eCommerce site by boosting social proof.
Effortlessly integrated with WooCommerce, the plugin can send a post-purchase notification to your customers, encouraging them to rate and review their experience of shopping on your website.
As a marketing tool, this can prove invaluable. Not only do products with genuine reviews from actual buyers tend to sell better, but the feedback you gain from your customers can also help you to iron out any problems and improve the overall shopping experience.
Another useful feature is the “review for discount” option in which, as the name implies, allows you to encourage customers to leave a review by offering them a discount on future purchases.
It’s also essential for us to note that although it’s purpose-built for WooCommerce, you don’t need that plugin to use this one. You could simply use it as a free alternative for your review-based website, though other tools may be more appropriate.
Get Customer Reviews for WooCommerce
4. Taqyeem
Easily one of the better-priced premium review plugins out there, Taqyeem packs a lot into it’s fixed-price $29 package.
Built with great-looking design in mind, this is an excellent option if your top priority is the aesthetic appeal of your WordPress review site.
Out of the box, your reviews will already come with a unique design that sets your site apart from the scores of others out there. From there, you can customize reviews with an unlimited color pallet, over 500 Google Web Fonts, and endless review criteria.
Elsewhere, you have the option to display your ratings as stars, points, or a percentage, and the flexibility determines where your review box is placed on the page.
That said, Taqyeem isn’t all style over substance.
A breeze to use, this low-cost plugin also allows for user-generated reviews and, of course, comes with rich snippets for each review to improve your Search Engine Optimisation efforts.
5. WP Customer Reviews
If you don’t quite have the budget for a premium plugin yet find the aforementioned WooCommerce-based plugin doesn’t quite cut it for you, WP Customer Reviews is undoubtedly the way to go.
With over 50,000 active installations and more than 400 four and five-star reviews on the WordPress plugin directory, it’s fair to say that this is the web’s favorite free WordPress review plugin.
Much as you’d expect, all of the standard review features, including rich snippets and customization options are present and correct, as are other useful options such as the ability to moderate user-generated reviews and decide which ones are displayed.
On the downside, the customization options aren’t as plentiful as they with some of WP Customer Review’s competitors, and it’s never going to win any awards for remarkable design.
That said, if you need a simple, minimalist review plugin to add user-generated content to your site, then this should be on your radar.
Another low-cost, premium WordPress reviewer plugin, Reviewer costs only $28 for a regular license with an option to pay for six months of additional support for just $8.63.
For that price, you get a terrific, feature-rich tool for adding both your reviews and user-generated content.
While Reviewer’s layout and design customization options may be somewhat limited, it more than makes up for it with the ability to add photos, icons, and other images to your reviews, a feature that is lacking even in some of the higher-priced plugins.
Like others on this list, you can choose between multiple rating styles, including stars, bars, pie charts, and percentages, and, of course, your reviews can be displayed in Google search results thanks to Rich Snippets.
Behind the scenes, Reviewer offers the ability to capture the names and contact details of your customers with anti-spam captchas and appropriate opt-in boxes to ensure compliance with global data protection laws. This helps to not only build those all-important email lists but also to display customer names along with their reviews to improve social proof further.
Finally, we love how simple Reviewer is to use. Despite the sheer volume of features at your disposal, the plugin never once feels complicated or overwhelming, making it an excellent choice for novice users.
7. Schema — All In One Schema Rich Snippets
By now, it should be fairly evident that all of the best WordPress review plugins come with schema markup to help you attractively present your reviews via Google search results, thus boosting your page rankings and, ultimately, your web traffic.
However, while all of the plugins we’ve featured in this guide do use schema markup, others don’t. That’s where Schema – the All-in-One Schema Rich Snippets plugin from Brainstorm Force comes into its own.
Though not a review plugin in and of itself, we’d be doing you a disservice if we didn’t include it here because it’s such a useful tool for anyone using a review plugin that doesn’t offer rich snippets.
Schema integrates with your existing plugin to show star ratings, pictures, and other essential information from your reviews in your Google search results, as well as when your reviews are shared on Facebook and other social media platforms.
A completely free-to-use plugin, this is an excellent add-on if you’re already using a free WordPress review plugin that lacks support for rich snippets. If, however, you’re not currently using any review plugin at all, you’ll find others on this list much more useful.
Get Schema – All in One Schema Rich Snippets
8. Google Review Widgets
Another unique tool, the popular Google Reviews Widget, operates very differently from the others we’ve featured in this guide. Rather than adding new reviews to your site, this one brings in existing reviews from Google My Business and displays them on your website.
This makes it an excellent choice for service-based business and review sites such as those focussed on restaurants, hotels, or tourist spots. You could, for example, write up your review of a particular place then use the Google Reviews Widget to show what others have been saying about the place on its Google Business profile.
The tool itself is free to use, though that does limit you to only a handful of reviews. To display more, you’ll need to upgrade to the premium version, which costs $85 per year for a single site license.
There’s no denying that this is a pretty steep price tag so, while we do think the Google Reviews Widget is very good at what it does, it may not be the perfect choice for those of you with a modest budget.
9. WP Business Reviews
With prices starting at $69 per year for a single site license, WP Business Reviews is hardly the most affordable option on this list, but it is one of the most powerful.
For that price, you can easily pull in reviews from Google, Yelp, Facebook, and Zomato.
Prefer to add your reviews?
You can do that too using customizable review templates.
The best part is that all of these reviews can be combined, so you can add your take on a product or place along with the best reviews from different platforms, presenting them all together in either a list, carousel, or box format.
WP Business Reviews can be configured to refresh automatically and pull-in new reviews every day, every week, or once a month, and you can even set it to filter out any reviews below a certain star quality.
Along with the aforementioned single site license, you can also get a five-site license for $99 per year, or a 15-site plan for $199 per year.
While that price can certainly be off-putting for some users, this may be worth a look for anyone serious about building the best review site possible.
10. Photo Reviews for WooCommece
As we touched on earlier, not all review plugins allow the option for users to upload photos with their reviews. This is a shame, as original images of actually purchased products can be a great way to add a sense of legitimacy to your reviews and further improve that all-important social proof.
Thankfully, that’s where Photo Reviews for WooCommerce comes into its own. A reliable alternative to our third-placed choice, the Customer Reviews for WooCommerce plugin, this one is designed specifically to allow for photo uploads with both your reviews as well as user-generated content.
That’s not all.
Even if you set the visual component aside for a while, this powerful tool from developers, VillaTheme, still has a lot to offer.
For example, you can use it to automatically send post-purchase emails to your customers, encouraging them to review your products and send them a discount code after they’ve done so.
You can use it to write and display your reviews, add ratings, and even apply custom CSS to modify the front-end design however you desire.
Photo Reviews for WooCommerce is free to use out of the box, though a premium version does exist, available for $30 with an optional $9.38 fee for extended customer support. For that price, you can also use masonry-style pop-ups, import reviews from the AliExpress dropshipping platform, and access additional design features.
Get Photo Reviews for WooCommerce
Which is the Best Review Plugin for My WordPress Website?
If you’ve read this far, you’ll no doubt agree that each of our top ten picks offers something distinctly unique. While that certainly gives you plenty of options, it can also make deciding which one to use a pretty tricky decision.
In our opinion, what it all comes down to is this:
If you’re looking for a free WordPress review plugin, either Customer Reviews for WooCommerce or WP Customer Reviews will suit you perfectly, with the latter often proving to be the best option if you’re not already running WooCommerce.
If you already have a review plugin installed and the only reason you’re here is that it doesn’t support rich snippets, you could save yourself some time and money by opting for Schema, the All-in-One Rich Snippets tool. This should be fully compatible with your existing plugin and will help you utilize rich snippets without the hassle of learning a brand new plugin.
If, on the other hand, you’re starting a WordPress review site from scratch and have a decent budget to play with, then our number-one ranked choice, the WP Review Pro, is absolutely the way to go.
Featuring a wealth of unique rich snippets, attractive templates, and an abundance of useful features to help you make your review site a resounding success.
