Posted by A client of mine recently requested a few changes to his website. One of these was to change the way that Google reviews were displayed on his website. This led to an investigation into the kinds of plugins that exist to help businesses display Google reviews on their WordPress website.
I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of the importance of online reviews, and how they can leed customers to make a purchasing decision. If you had to choose a business, one that had a wealth of 5-star Google reviews, and one that didn’t, which would you choose? It’s a no brainer!
The previous review system was simply taking selected customer reviews from Google, and displaying them on the site, with links back to the GMB (Google My Business) page to allow the customer to confirm the authenticity of the review.
A development of this would be to have these reviews dynamically populated from Google, and to have these in a carousel or slider format, to allow better displaying of reviews on a mobile platform.
WP Google Review Slider
A solution for displaying Google reviews on your WordPress site is WP Google Review Slider. This plugin has 103 5-star ratings on WordPress and was recently updated, always a good sign. The plugin creates a slider from your Google My Business reviews to include within your website.
Installation and activation is straightforward. The plugin creates a menu in the side admin bar. The first step is to find your business. I couldn’t find mine initially but used the Place ID Finder link to locate my business. You can also set the minimum review rating and allow the plugin to auto fetch your latest reviews.
It was initially a little fiddly, but I managed to save by location details and then hit Retrieve Reviews (after an initial error, to get my reviews from Google. These were then displayed on the Reviews List page.
The next step is to visit the Templates tab, and setup how you want your reviews to be displayed. You can enable this for either posts/pages or widgets, and can choose to create a slider also. Custom CSS can be used to style your reviews also.
Once you’ve saved this you’ll see your review template in your Templates tab. You can click on the Shortcode tab to access the code you need to display on your page. This can easily be placed in an HTML section of your site.
It works well, although there are a few things that could be problematic (at least with using the free version). The slider doesn’t show backwards and forwards arrows on the side, making it difficult to navigate the slider. This may be a problem for user experience (UX). It’s also not functioning ideally from a responsive perspective. This could be solved by having a slider designed for both mobile, and desktop, with the corresponding slider displayed for each type of device.
If you’re happy using WP Google Review Slider but want to have additional functionality please support the dvelopers, paying $29 per year and signing up for the pro version of the plugin.
Everest Google Places Reviews
Currently available for a one-off cost of $18 is Google Places Reviews by Everest. This plugin is not perfect but gives you many options for displaying your Google reviews. You’ll need to set up a Google Places API key for the plugin, but once you’ve done this it’s relatively straightforward to use.
There are options to set up badges and company banners within the review section of your site. There are around 10 templates you can use to style the ways that the reviews are displayed, and also offers links to your Google Places page, plus a direct link for customers to leave reviews, so could potentially help you to get more reviews.
You can configure a slider to display your reviews as well as showing them all together, and this can be styled with your own site’s colours to aid in integrating the plugin into your website. Here’s a screenshot of Everest Google Places Reviews in action…
