Many of today’s successful review websites run on WordPress and are powered by some of the best WordPress review plugins out there. They’ve become a very important element in today’s e-commerce space. In one study by MarketingLand, they report that out of 1,046 survey participants, 90 percent admit that their buying decisions are in fact influenced by online reviews.[1]
Furthermore, according to another survey, 79 percent of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.[2]
Those are just two of the potential reasons why launching a review site could be something you might want to consider. The stats don’t lie. So, just to make this a bit easier …
Here are 6 of the best WordPress review plugins … reviewed:
Our list begins with Otter Blocks, which features two really engaging, easy-to-navigate review blocks that you can add to your WordPress site.
The first is a product review block and the second is a review comparison table. The latter is composed from the reviews left by your customers in the former.
Let’s take a closer look at each one.
Okay, so right off the bat, one thing that you will appreciate if you run your ecommerce store with WooCommerce, is that the product review block syncs with WooCommerce.
This allows you to import information about your existing products without having to spend hours re-typing or copying and pasting product info you already have.
Beyond that, it has some really useful features that you’d want out of a high quality WordPress review plugin. These include:
- Styles: some options are available to change the general appearance of the block.
- Product Details: you can either import this information from WooCommerce or type up some fresh copy on your own.
- Product Features: these can be adjusted, even if you choose to sync with WooCommerce, and for each one, you can insert a title and a rating.
- Pros and Cons: increase the credibility of a review by allowing reviewers to present an honest, balanced review.
- Links: insert links to the platforms where the product that’s being reviewed is sold – whether that’s your own site or another site that you are affiliate partners with; you can also add a label and a disclaimer notice.
- Color Customizations: adjust the color scheme to match your website’s brand identity.
👆 Once you have some reviews collected, you can then begin using the product review comparison table that you see in the image above.
In order to do that, please follow these steps:
- Step 1: Navigate to the desired page and add the product review component from the blocks library.
- Step 2: Publish the page, otherwise it will not work.
- Step 3: Repeat the steps above for however many reviews you want to compare.
See below for a brief animation of what this looks like in practice:
As you can see, both the product review block and the review comparison table are easy to use, customizable, and will work well on any ecommerce store, affiliate sales site, or any other website that requires reviews. You could easily make a case that if those two features were standalone plugins, that they would be among the best WordPress review plugins on the market.
However, Otter Blocks offers dozens of free enhancements beyond only the review features we showed you above. It can really make your WordPress review site stand out from the competition.
Having said that, it’s important to note that Otter Blocks is designed to work with the native WordPress (Gutenberg) editor. If you are using an external website builder such as Elementor or Beaver Builder, then Otter Blocks isn’t going to be the best option.
If that’s the case, you may want to either switch over to the Gutenberg editor (there are advantages to this) or consider one of the other WordPress review plugins on this list. If you haven’t used Gutenberg before and want to get a feel for it in a demo environment, you can do that on this page.
2. Site Reviews
When many people think about searching for the best WordPress review plugins, they assume that most likely the truly best ones won’t be free. As you just saw with Otter Blocks, that is simply not the case. This second WordPress review plugin on our list only reinforces the point. While it does offer a premium version, there are more than enough great features in the free version to satisfy most user’s needs. Let’s dive deeper below:
First, let’s take a look at the General Settings panel of this WordPress review plugin:
These are the main settings that you can go through first, before writing any reviews. As is plainly visible, there are a lot of nice options here already.
For example, you can set up a filter that will flag anything below a certain threshold for review. This can come in handy for dealing with unscrupulous competitors who might try to harm your reputation with fabricated negative reviews. It goes without saying, but abusing this feature for withholding genuine negative reviews is not encouraged. It’s simply to prevent abusive fake reviews.
There is also the option to control who receives different notifications, including the option to integrate Slack push notifications. This looks like:
Another thing we love about this WordPress review plugin is that it supports both Gutenberg users and those who prefer the classic WordPress editor. If using Gutenberg, the Site Reviews interface looks like:
If you choose to use the classic editor, you can use the dropdown button to insert shortcodes:
In addition to the above possibilities, Site Reviews also allows you to use WordPress widgets to insert reviews that way. It comes packed with a ton of features, including some of the following:
- Assign Reviews to Categories, Pages or Users: this makes it easier to organize your reviews in ways that work best for you.
- Backup and Restore: export and import your settings and custom text strings, and use the WordPress export and import tools to backup your reviews.
- Blacklist: block review submissions which contain specific words, phrases, IP addresses, names, and emails.
- Form Styles: match the review form with popular themes and form plugins for a consistent experience.
- Members-Only: require users to be logged in before submitting a review.
- SPAM Protection: includes 5 layers of protection from spam – Honeypot, 4 CAPTCHA options (FriendlyCaptcha, hCaptcha, reCAPTCHA v2 Invisible, and reCAPTCHA v3), Akismet, Blacklist, and Review limits.
All in all, it’s an excellent choice for anyone looking for a quality WordPress review plugin to power their review site, ecommerce store, or other website that’s dependent on reviews. Check it out for yourself!
3. WP Review
Another similar WordPress review plugin that will help you build your site very quickly.
This one offers total freedom to the visitor. Everyone can come to the site and leave a vote.
Also, WP Review calculates the average vote based on the ratings.
This review plugin is very easy to use.
After the installation, go to Settings in your WordPress dashboard and then click on WP Review. Here, you can set your default options. You should do so only if you’re going to use the same details for all products. So if you think most of your products will have common features, you can set them there. This way, it won’t be necessary to repeat the process for every product you list.
After you set the default options, what comes next is even easier. Go to the post where you want to add your review, and exactly the same as with the previous WordPress review plugin, you’ll find specific options on the post editing screen. If your default options are not enough for the post, you can add more things in there. Also, you have the choice between three types of ratings: stars, points, and percentages.
I did a quick test with points with the plugin’s default color scheme. Here is what it looks like:
As you can see, the summary (you can name it the way you like) shows the average rating and a description if you want to say something more about the product. The user ratings are not there by default (they can be enabled).
4. Ultimate Reviews
Ultimate Reviews gives you two shortcodes or blocks – one to embed reviews and another to add a form for users to submit their own reviews. You can use one or both according to your needs.
Once you install and activate the plugin, you can go to the new Reviews area in your WordPress dashboard to configure it:
Then, to add reviews to individual pieces of content, you’ll first need to go to Reviews → Add New to create a new review:
Then, you can embed reviews using the plugin’s shortcode or its dedicated block. Here’s what it looks like with the block:
Once you publish your post, you’ll see your review on the front-end of your site. Here’s an example of what it looks like:
The free version is pretty basic, but the premium version lets you create more in-depth review boxes with more features and fields.
You can also use a separate shortcode or block to embed a form that lets users submit their own product reviews. Then, you can display those reviews using the same method that you saw above.
5. WP Ultimate Review
WP Ultimate Review is a newer WordPress review plugin that boasts modern designs right out of the box.
After activating the plugin, you can go to the new Wp Reviews area in your WordPress dashboard to configure the plugin’s settings.
There, you can choose which review fields to use and whether or not to enable user comment reviews:
After you’re done adjusting those, you can go to the individual post, where you want the ratings box to show up. There are some additional options, which provide more details that your visitors might want to see in a review.
This is what the final rating box looks like – you can see how it has a pretty modern-looking design:
You can also use a shortcode to embed a user rating form, if you want to allow user ratings on your review pages.
6. Comments Ratings
Unlike some of the other plugins, this plugin is meant entirely for the visitors. They can leave their ratings through comments. Using this plugin is a piece of cake.
Here’s the settings page, for example:
And that would be all. You just decide where you want to enable user comments and what text to use.
Let’s see what it looks like in action:
In the end, if you need a nice and small plugin which allows your visitors to vote via comments, this one is very effective.
What do you think about these WordPress review plugins? Did you try any of them? Feel free to let us know if there’s any other plugin that should make its appearance on this list.👉 Bonus: here’s a list of some essential WordPress plugins that all sites can benefit from.
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Hi Adelina,
I would highly recommend WP review as it does not effect site speed because of its small footprint.
Also its better to get a customized plugin according to your needs rather than to regret.
Thanks
Team- MakeWebbetter
If you update this post please consider adding the Ultimate Reviews plugin to this list as well. Good solid plugin and great support. Lots of styling and rating features. Allow in-depth reviews and create additional review fields, such as value, appearance, quality, etc. You can also add custom fields that don’t impact the overall review score. There’s also an affiliate program for this plugin, great if you’re someone who blogs about WordPress.
Interesant, Rich Reviews pare sa fie ce-mi trebuie mie pe blog, o sa-l incerc.
The user rating option is crap and a huge disappointment. Users cannot rate on different fields unlike the webmaster and only have one option.
I’m looking for a plugin that will allow users to review blog post/article content, then show an aggregate, plus other details. I’ve tried WP Review Pro by MyThemeShop, however this seems geared toward the blog author reviewing products, movies, etc. I need it to be entirely focused on how the user perceives the content. The idea is that if I can get this type of feedback separate from blog comments, I can improve my posts. Does such a thing exist?
I am looking for yotpo alternative, something that can send emails to customers after their order. Can you please suggest something?
Always informative and educational reviews, thank you.
Why is it worth a try, other than your getting an affiliate payment?
Hey Nick,
Its not about affiliate payment. You can remove the affiliate parameter add your own and buy 🙂
The reason I shared is the demo and features look great. The readymade demo layout seems to be able to fit in any type of websites. Thank you for replying.
What annoys me is if one is going to put in an affiliate code, at least share enough that provides some justification like providing value. If even after all that prompting you still get some generic return like what I am hearing, then I’d have to be skeptical about why you’re posting and your connection to the product. It’s that simple.
Lots of good information here, but none of these quite fills my needs. I am looking for a plugin that will aggregate reviews from the major review sites such as Google, Facebook, Yelp, Trip Advisor, etc and allow me to display the best of these reviews on the website. It should display with a link to the original review site so that people can verify that the review is legitimate.
Any ideas on where I could find such a plugin?
Thanks,
Mike
Very useful article, thanks for sharing 🙂
Thanks for your article. I see lots of people use WP Review, it’s so great!
Yup, the user ratings are available, you should check again. It works for me.
WP Review is the best i must say…..Perfect for the reviews and also my site looks clean.
Nice list…
At the second plugin when you say “The user ratings are not there by default (they can be enabled).” it would have been more friendly to say it was on the pro version.
Hi! Actually, they’re available in the free version too. You should check again. 🙂 After you enable them, log out so you can be able to rate the product as a user.
Unfortunately it is not that great. A normal user can only rate on 1 5 star rating and thats it. I want them to be able to rate on additional fields i add.
The first plugin, WP Product Review (https://themeisle.com/plugins/wp-product-review-lite/), lets people rate each feature of the product, added by you in the first place. You can read what I wrote in the description and see if it’s what you’re looking for. You can also test it because it’s free.
euh, actualyl it seems to have that option even in free version, so not sure what you saw, maybe they added it recently –
hey Art – this is basically exactly what i need – what did you use in the end and have you been satisfied with your choice ?
cheeers
Barni
Me too! What did you end up using?
hi shelly – sorry i didnt see your answer earlier – i ended up using Rich Reviews – how about you ?
WP Review – the perfect plugin for my review-based site! Thanks!
Thank you