Do you want to add product reviews and ratings to your WordPress store?
Having product reviews and ratings on your WordPress site is one of the best ways to improve conversions and boost sales on your WordPress site.
According to research, 98% of online shoppers read product reviews before making a purchase, and 77% prefer websites with ratings and reviews.
Online shoppers want social proof, value for their money, and the assurance that they are buying what other people use and like. A quick way to deduce this is from product reviews and ratings.
In this guide, we will learn how to add product reviews and ratings to a WordPress site. We will follow a step-by-step process for adding product reviews to a WooCommerce store and Easy Digital Downloads powered e-commerce product pages
Table of Contents
Why Add Product Reviews?
Product reviews and ratings offer various benefits to you as a business owner and your customers. Online reviews can drive traffic to your website, improve your sales, and provide valuable information to your customers.
Below are some benefits you can derive from adding reviews to your website.
1. Feedback
Reviews are a great way to get genuine feedback from your customers. When someone buys your product and leaves a review, you get the opportunity to learn about what they like or dislike about it, which allows you to evaluate and improve your product.
2. Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is mostly about improving your website structure and content to draw more search engine traffic. Product reviews implemented with structured data for Google rich snippets can appear on search engine result pages, resulting in higher rankings and more traffic to your website.
In addition to the rating stars that can show on search engines, product reviews can also add keyword-rich content to your web pages, which can show up in searches and drive traffic to your website.
3. Social Proof
Social proof is a psychological effect that is very common among online shoppers. It occurs when people make decisions based on the collective actions of other people. This is a common phenomenon in our society. You see someone buying a type of headphones, and suddenly, everyone wants to own one of those.
Product reviews on your WordPress site give you this social proof and help your customers make a prompt buying decision.
How to Add Product Reviews & Ratings to WordPress
There are several ways to add product reviews and ratings to a WordPress site, but in this guide, we will use the FeedbackWP plugin.
FeedbackWP is the best WordPress reviews and ratings plugin. It has all the features that make adding product reviews to a WordPress site easy. This plugin supports both WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads products, and in this guide, we will learn how to add product reviews to both product types.
Also, FeedbackWP supports the structured data for Google-rich snippets, which means there is an excellent chance that search engines like Google will show your reviews and star ratings on search result pages, which can increase your traffic and sales.
How to Add Product Reviews & Ratings to Easy Digital Downloads
To add product reviews and ratings to your Easy Digital Downloads products, follow the steps below.
1. Install and Activate FeedbackWP
To get started, visit the FeedbackWP website to purchase a license for the FeedbackWP plugin. Once you purchase your copy of the plugin, you will receive an email containing the plugin file and your license key.
Download the plugin, go to your WordPress admin dashboard, navigate to the Plugins page, click the “Add New” button and click “Upload Plugin“.
Next, click “Choose file” to select the downloaded plugin zip file and click “Install Now.”
After the installation is complete, click the “Activate Plugin” button.
After activating FeedbackWP, you will need to install the FeedbackWP Core plugin. Click on the “Install FeedbackWP Core” button to complete the plugin installation.
The next step is to activate your license. Navigate to FeedbackWP > Settings and select “License” from the plugin settings page.
Copy the license key previously sent to your email and paste it into the box, then click the “Verify License” button.
Now, you have installed and activated the FeedbackWP plugin on your WordPress website.
2. Configure FeedbackWP Settings for EDD
After installing and activating FeedbackWP, we need to set up the FeebackWP Plugin to add reviews and star ratings to our Easy Digital Downloads product pages.
Navigate to FeedbackWP > Settings, and you will be presented with the configuration options page. Scroll down to the “Custom Post Type” section, add “download” to FeedbackWP custom post type settings, and save. That way, the rating widget will be added to all EDD products/downloads.
Click on the “save settings” button to save your changes.
Now, you should see a star rating widget on all EDD product pages. When you click on the star rating, a text box will appear for your text review of the product.
How to Add Reviews & Ratings to WooCommerce Product Pages
This section will follow a step-by-step process to add product reviews and ratings to our WooCommerce product pages.
1. Disable the WooCommerce Product Review Feature
The next step is to disable the default WooCommerce product review feature. WooCommerce comes with a basic product review feature, but we won’t need it since we are using the robust FeedbackWP plugin. So you need to disable it for FeedbackWP to take charge of adding reviews to your WooCommerce product pages so that you can benefit from the various customization options that it provides.
From your WordPress admin, go to WooCommerce > Settings and click on the products tab at the top.
Scroll down to the Reviews section, under the Enable Reviews heading, uncheck the “Enable product reviews” checkbox as shown below.
Click the Save Changes button, and you will be done.
2. Configure FeedbackWP Settings for WooCommerce
Next, we will configure the FeebackWP Plugin to add reviews and star ratings to our WooCommerce product pages.
Navigate to FeedbackWP > Settings, and you will be presented with the configuration options page. Scroll down to the “Custom Post Type” section and add “product” to the FeedbackWP custom post types settings, as shown below.
The next step is to configure the Feedback Widget settings. The feedback widget will add a text input to our product pages so that users can write reviews about a product.
FeedbackWP comes with two configuration options for the feedback widgets. These options allow you to enable/disable the widget and enable/disable email notifications for feedback.
You need to enable the “Show feedback widget if the rating is negative” as shown in the image above. What this does is that it shows a text box to collect the customer’s feedback on the product pages.
Click on the “save settings” button to save your changes.
What we have just done is configure FeedbackWP to include a star rating and review widget on all product pages. The result widget will automatically display the current star rating on all Woocomemrce product pages.
If you look at the image above, you will discover that we now have a star rating widget on the product page, but it could be better, so we need to customize it.
How to Customize Reviews and Ratings on Product Pages
FeedbackWP comes with a customization panel that allows you to customize various aspects of the plugin.
From the settings page, click the “Customize” tab and scroll down to the “Strings – Rating Widget” section. This section allows you to customize the various display text in the star rating system.
The important thing to do here is to edit the Title. The default title is “How useful was this post?”, but this is not a post, so we will change it to “product”. Our new title will be “How useful was this product?”. You can customize this text to whatever you prefer.
The next change is the “Text after vote:” text. Replace the “post” word with “product” and you should be good to go. I recommend you modify the other fields to match your particular use case.
You will also need to do the same for the feedback widget, change the text to match your use case and save your changes.
Now, go to any product page, and you will see an updated star rating widget and a result widget showing the average star rating for the product.
That’s it. You have successfully added a search engine-optimized review and star rating to your product pages.
Conclusion
In this article, we have learned how to add product reviews to WordPress product pages for both WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads.
Adding product reviews and ratings to WordPress is not rocket science. With a solution like the FeedbackWP plugin, you can easily add a robust review and ratings system to your WordPress site with a few mouse clicks.