Star ratings are used by websites to review all kinds of products and services. You can use them to rate pretty much anything your users are interested in: a movie, the food in a restaurant, the quality of service provided by a mechanic, etc.
One of the reasons star ratings are so popular is that they allow users to quickly determine the quality of a product or service based on the experience of people who have used it.
It is also very common to find businesses asking people to rate their services or products. This is because people are more likely to buy something if they see real reviews from other people who have actually used it.
If your website sells something, it is a good idea to include a star rating system somewhere so that your customers can review your products.
In this post, I'll list the ten best WordPress star rating plugins on CodeCanyon and Envato Elements that you can use today.
Before we look at the star rating plugins let's explore the benefits of monthly subscription to Envato Elements.
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Star Rating Plugins on both Envato Elements and CodeCanyon
Here is a brief review of the best WordPress star rating plugins that you can buy on Envato Elements an CodeCanyon. In the descriptions, will mention plugins that appear on both market places.
1. Star Rating for WordPress
STar Rating is a simple star rating plugin for WordPress that gives you the option to create and save ratings for each WordPress entry like a post, page, or product.
The review microdata is also visible in search results, so you will get a boost in visibility. It is fully compatible with all popular WordPress themes.
It comes with a lot of customization options. You can easily change the color, size, and shape of icons that are used to display the rating to users. The rating assigned to each post or page is also visible on the search page.
The plugin has cross-browser compatibility and does not rely on jQuery to work properly. You can also download it with a subscription from Envato Elements.
2. Testimonials Showcase
This WordPress testimonial plugin with star rating gives you an easy way to display testimonials, reviews, and quotes from users in an attractive layout.
It is very flexible in terms of customization options and offers a responsive design. It's compatible with rich snippets and structured data used by search engines to display reviews and ratings in search results.
The reviews and testimonials can be showcased on the front-end either as a grid or as a slider. Each of these layouts comes with its own settings to control the look and feel of the reviews.
There are five different themes that you can use with this plugin: rounded speech bubbles, flat speech bubbles, flat card box, quote marks, or simple separator. With a low-cost monthly subscription you can download this plugin and many other from Envato Elements.
3. WordPress Facebook Reviews Plugin
4. Epic Review - WordPress Plugin
Available on both CodeCanyon and Envato Elements, this WordPress post rating plugin is also an add-on for Elementor and WPBakery Page Builder.
5. Excited! Testimonial Showcase for WordPress
This WordPress testimonial plugin with star ratings, available exclusively on Envato Elements, is packed with excting features like:
- beautiful layouts and templates that you can customize to your heart's delight
- testimonial builder with eye-catching presentation styles: classic grid, grid with tooltips, single testimonial with or without slider, and widgets
- rating submission with approval system
- supports rich snippets for search engines
- shortcode to place submission form anywhere on your website
The plugin is 100% responsive and the summary block fits any container. In addition, it's compatible with Visual Composer, MailChimp, and WPML translation plugin.
Star Rating Plugins Exclusively on CodeCanyon
There are currently about 70 premium WordPress star rating plugins available on CodeCanyon. All of them serve some unique purpose, like adding a star rating field to different forms or allowing users to review a product or service on your website.
The price for some of these star rating plugins starts from as low as $7. The fact that you get free lifetime updates and six months of free support makes buying them a very good deal.
Here is a brief review of the best star rating plugins that you can buy on CodeCanyon:
5. Rating Form
This is one of the best WordPress star rating plugins on CodeCanyon. It is highly rated and receives updates at regular intervals. Each update also adds a lot of new features to the plugin.
The ratings are updated using AJAX, and a nice spinning animation is shown while the plugin updates the rating in the database. The results are immediately visible on the webpage once a user submits the ratings.
You can choose from different rating images provided by the plugin or upload your own custom images. You can add star ratings to any post or webpage using shortcodes. It is also possible to use the ratings with comments by using the comment_id attribute in shortcodes.
6. AP Custom Testimonial Pro
The AP Custom Testimonial Pro plugin also allows you to showcase reviews and testimonials from your clients and customers on your website.
The WordPress testimonial plugin with star rating comes with 12 different layouts to display the user reviews. It also offers some other unique features like embedding videos in the testimonials or only displaying certain user reviews based on their ID. You can also optionally add links to the social media accounts of clients who write a review.
The plugin gives you granular control over all aspects of the review. This includes things like the image border color, review title color, review content color, etc.
The shortcode generator that comes with this plugin makes it incredibly easy for you to create custom shortcodes to display the testimonials exactly the way you want.
7. BNE Testimonials Pro
You can use the WordPress BNE Testimonials Pro plugin to display testimonials and reviews anywhere on your website.
The plugin offers a large variety of customization and layout options for the reviews. You can choose from four different layouts: list, slider, thumbnail slider, and masonry grid. There are also four different themes: simple, default, bubbles, and cards.
The star ratings incorporate Schema.org tags to make sure that the rich snippets for the review are visible in search results.
One big advantage of using this plugin is that it offers the ability to import reviews from other platforms like Facebook, Google, and Yelp. So, if your users have written any reviews about your business on Facebook, they will be automatically pulled and added to your own website.
8. Ratings and Reviews Plugin for WordPress
Ratings and Reviews plugin for WordPress allows you to set up single rating or multi-ratings for a review. The plugin displays a list of reviews, and adds a review button, submission form, stars and ratings.
For multi-rating you can configure any number of ratings criterias like usability, comfort, size, price, service, and so on. Users will rate each criteria separately.
You can also place ratings and reviews in any WooCommerce products and display product price along with review rating in the reviews slider widget on product page or a separate single review page.
9. WP Facebook Review Showcase
Using WP Facebook Review Showcase you can add your starred Facebook reviews on your website. You can them in eye-popping fashion thanks to 10 beautifully designed templates for page reviews with user ratings and 10 beautifully designed badge templates with ribbons attached. Each template is fully equipped with a variety of animation styles.
You can configure the reviews display to showcase only 5 star reviews from Facebook on your website. Reviews can also be displayed by pagination to give your audience the freedom to view as many as they want.
Use shortcodes to embed your reviews in any of your pages. And also get the chance to display your reviews in widget areas—sidebar or footer position.
A caching option is also built into the plugin to help you optimize your site and make the pages load faster. The plugin is completely responsive to all screen sizes and resolutions.
10. Gravity Forms Star Rating Field
Gravity Forms Star Rating Field is rating form plugin that allows you to add star rating fields to all your Gravity Forms.
11. Contact Form 7 Star Rating Field
Contact Form 7 Star Rating Field lets you add star rating fields to any of your Contact Form 7 forms. There are 12 different customization options available.
This rating form plugin works with all versions of the Contact Form 7 plugin, and you can also make the rating field required for form submission. The plugin also allows you to set a default rating value for the field.
One more feature that you will find useful is the ability to include rating results in an email using a shortcode.
12. Rating Stars Messages for WooCommerce
Rating Stars Messages for WooCommerce allows you to create flexible and catchy messages on the product page based on product rating. This plugin can be used both as a complete rating stars replacement or as an addition to it. This creates engagement and positive mood to the customer and help you increase sales.
Free WordPress Star Rating Plugins
Before listing some free WordPress star rating plugins, I would like to mention that using premium plugins comes with its own advantages. The premium plugin developers are more likely to provide regular updates and solve any issues that you might be facing with the use of these plugins. This is especially true for the best-sellers on CodeCanyon or Elements.
Also, the premium plugins generally offer a more polished design to give your website a professional look. But sometimes a free plugin is the right choice for a limited budget—I've pulled together a few of these free plugins below.
13. GD Rating System
With GD Rating System you can rate anything—including posts, custom posts, comments, users, and more. You can also rate one or more categories. It supports rich snippets, post integration and comment integration. With shortcodes, you can place ratings anywhere on your website.
14. WP Customer Reviews
Get ratings from users using WP Customer Reviews. This multisite and multiuser star rating plugin allows you to setup a specific page on your blog to receive testimonials from customers about your business or service. Customers can write reviews about products you carry. All reviews are moderated and can include images. Widgets can be customized. There is spam protection. In addition to rich snippet support, this lightweight plugin has caching to help your pages load faster.
15. Site Reviews
This plugin is more suited for people who want to allow users to provide reviews in a manner similar to websites like TripAdvisor or Yelp. It comes with a nice set of features that you can see on the plugin description page.
16. Yasr—Yet Another Stars Rating
This plugin comes with two different types of ratings. The first type is provided by the post author. This is ideal for websites that publish reviews of different products and services. The second type gives your visitors the ability to vote.
17. Rate My Post—WP Post Rating
People who are only looking for a WordPress star rating plugin so that they can allow users to rate their posts and pages should consider using the Rate My Post WordPress plugin. It will allow you to easily add ratings to all your posts and pages using shortcodes.
Benefits of Using Star Ratings
A website with built-in customer review and star rating component is easily recognized by search engines. Allowing users to leave their reviews and star ratings on different aspects of your business like product, blog posts etc, has many benefits for your business.
Star Ratings Increase Engagement and Traffic
They can vastly increases engagement and traffic to your website by boosting your site's search engine rankings for certain searches.
Star Ratings Are Easily Picked up By Search Engines
Reviews are a source of fresh content to search engines. It's why search results include customer reviews and star ratings from websites. This builds your credibility.
Star Ratings Offer Great Opportunities for Improvement
A customer may like your delicious food but they are not impressed by your customer service. For this reason they give you 3 stars instead of 5 stars. You now have a chance to take their feedback and improve where your services are lacking.
Ways You Can Use Star Rating on Your Website
Having looked at best practices, let's now explore ways you can use star ratings on your website.
The most popular use of star ratings is to rate products or blog posts.
But you can expand the uses of star ratings to include many other aspects of your business by doing the following:
- let customers upload photos of them using your products then allow other users comment and give star rating of the photos
- let customer upload videos of them using your product then allow other users leave their comments and rate the videos
- let customers rate reviews written by others. Use prompts like: was this review helpful?
This is how you create engagement that makes the website active in the eyes on search engines that are always looking for fresh content.
Promotion
If you're running a sales promotion, how about letting customers rate the promotion? It creates a lot of buzz that helps your promotion take off and become successful. Also ratings helps give social proof to the promotion letting other customers know if its worth their time.
Blog topic suggestions
You can ask customers to suggest topics for your blog and have other customers weigh in with their ratings. This way you can keep your content fresh writing something that is relevant to customers. In addition, you build a community of users that feel their feedback is valued.
How to Get Customers to Submit Ratings
Prominently Display Review Tools
Let customers know they can leave their reviews and make it easy for them to do so. It's easy. Prominently display tools that invite them to leave ratings or reviews. You can use prompts like rate this product, review this product, and so on.
Email Reminders
Send email reminding customers to reviews products they've purchased. Know the lead times allows you to send out the email after customers have received their products. You can ask them to rate different aspects: customer service, delivery time, the product itself and more.
Incentives Are a Win-Win
When you offer customers coupons for their next purchase in exchange for their reviews and ratings, it's a win-win for both you and your customers.
Best Practices to Keep in Mind When Using Star Rating Plugins
The ultimate goal of using these star rating plugins is to help your website visitors. So here are some guidelines that you can follow to use them in a way that benefits the visitors.
1. Place Ratings Only in Important Places
If you are reviewing a product or service for your visitors, make sure that you don't place the same ratings in ten different places. If you are writing a detailed review of the product, it is acceptable to provide different ratings for different aspects like the design, quality, pricing, etc. However, don't use the same overall 8/10 rating in six different places in a post.
2. Use Rich Snippet Data With the Correct Attributes
Search engines usually display star ratings in their search results only when they think that it will provide some useful information. For example, let's say you use rich snippets that display star ratings for products but use attributes that indicate that the rating is for posts. In such cases, the search engines might not show the ratings in their search results at all. So make sure that the rich snippet data to show the ratings has the correct attributes.
Final Thoughts
In this post, we have briefly reviewed both free and premium WordPress star rating plugins that you can add to your website. The aim of the post was to include the best WordPress star rating plugins for certain tasks like user testimonials, form fields, and product reviews.
The Best WordPress Plugins on CodeCanyon
If you are looking for a WordPress plugin for any use, take a look at the premium WordPress plugins on CodeCanyon. Hopefully, one of the plugins listed there will meet all your needs.
Here are a few of the best-selling and hot new WordPress plugins available on CodeCanyon for 2021.
WordPress22 Best WPBakery Page Builder (Visual Composer) Addons and Extensions of 2021
WordPress25 Best WordPress Slider & Carousel Plugins of 2021
WordPress20 Best WordPress Calendar Plugins and Widgets (+5 Free Plugins)
WordPress Plugins27 Best Popup & Opt-in WordPress Plugins
This post has been updated with contributions from Franc Lucas. Franc is a writer for Envato Tuts+ who enjoys exploring the world of SaaS.
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