Online reviews
In recent years online reviews have become huge evidently shown by websites such as TripAdvisor and Rotten Tomatoes. Consumers love to hear feedback from people who know what they are talking about – a study shows that 88% trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from people they know. If you are a WordPress Blogger creating helpful reviews would be a great way to generate more traffic to your site. To do this you will want to make sure your reviews look nice and this is where plugins come in. There are many review plugins available so I have made this comparison of two of the most popular to help you choose.
WP Review
WP Review is the most installed review plugin available from WordPress. It is free, however, there is a paid version available with extra features. WP Review allows visitors to be able to come onto your site and rate the thing that you are reviewing. It then works out an average based on all of the ratings and displays this. There is a lot of customization available, for example, you have a choice between three types of ratings: stars, points, and percentages.
Once you have installed the plugin if you go to ‘Settings’ you can customize the styling and defaults. You can choose the colour you want your review to appear in and style it to match your own website. Adding features to the defaults section is a good idea if you plan on reviewing things with the same features so you do not have to keep manually adding them in.
After you set the default settings you can easily add a review to a post. Go to ‘Add New’ and at the bottom of the page, you will see specific options to edit the post. If you do not want to use the defaults or need to add more features then you can easily do that from here. This is also where you choose between the three different types of ratings that I mentioned earlier. You can also enable or disable user reviews here.
This is an example of what it looks like whilst adding a review to your post. As you can see it is very straightforward and does not take long to do at all. Here is what it looks like once it is posted.
Preview
Obviously, this is just an example, you could customize it completely differently and they would look very different. It is very simple and easy to use so it will not be difficult to find a design that matches your website nicely. Overall I think WP Review is very good, it has a very user-friendly interface and gives you different rating systems. There is also a lot of customization and allows readers to get involved with the ‘User Rating’.
WP Product Review Lite
WP Product Review Lite is also a free review plugin that has the option of a paid version. It is very similar to WP Review, with a lot of great features. One difference is instead of a summary, each product you review has a list of pros and cons and a general description box. You can still rate individual features, however, there is no choice of rating systems, it is just out of 100.
This is what the settings look like.
So as you can see, there are a few differences to the last plugin. You have the option to have an image in your review if you would like and also an affiliate link if this is something you have set up. As previously mentioned you cannot change the scoring system and there are fewer customisation options such as changing the colour.
Here is where you can add pros and cons to your review. This is a good idea as it is clear to the reader what you like and dislike about the product that you are reviewing.
Preview
This is how the review would look to readers. It is very simple and did not take long to do at all to do. One problem with this plugin is the lack of customisation available. For example, the same colours are used every time, so all reviews look similar and might not match your website.
Comparison
Both plugins are very easy to use and for free, are a great addition to any blog. I think out of the two, WP Review has more features, such as the three different ways to rate something. Having an unlimited amount of colours to choose from makes it more personal to your website. I also like the default features in the settings which WP Product Review Lite does not have. I would recommend both plugins, so give them a try and see which you like the most.