WordPress WP Reviews Plugin: Make Your Reviews Stand Out From the Crowd

In this post I will show you how you can make your reviews look awesome and help you sell even more with affiliate marketing.

Writing a review of a product you love and want to share with your audience, is also a great way to make a little cash on your website.

But some of the problems we all face with our content are:

• standing out from the crowd on Google and in your review
• making our content easy to read
• giving a simple and professional look to our site

As a blogger, marketer and web designer, I am always looking for new ways to make my posts and reviews look awesome, help my readers, and of course sell more of the products (the ones I love and support of course).

I have tried and checked quite a few WordPress plugins before I came upon the answer: WordPress WP Reviews Plugin

What Can the WP Reviews Plugin Do?

There are a couple of things a review plugin needs to do, and this one ticks all the boxes.

The first one is adding review stars to your Google search result.

Google Search Results for Reviews

One of the keys to getting people to read your review after the initial traffic has faded is standing out on Google.

You might have heard about rich snippets. But, in case you have not here goes…

Rich Snippets are a way of providing more useful information in search results, in this case it is the stars for a review like this:

And with the recent permanent removal of Google Authorship (author images) this is one of the best ways to stand out in search results.

The Review Header

You have already seen half of the features at the top of this post! The review header.

The WordPress Reviews Plugin provides a focused review summary header for the product you are reviewing. Here is a visual breakdown of what it can show:

The header covers everything from:

• Product image
• Star review rating
• Feature breakdown and rating
• Product cost
• Review summary
• Link to the product (typically an affiliate link)

And as you can see by the overview and layout that the header provides, it is super stylish and gives all the most important information in one hit.

The Review Footer (including Pros and Cons)

After a reader has read the review (or at least scanned it) they will often head to the bottom to read your final summary.

This is where the Review Footer comes into play. It provides a list of pros and cons, which is what every buyer is really looking for.

Here is an example of the pros and cons, and final footer taken from a sample review:

And you can also provide a quick summary as well (as you see in gray above).

I don’t typically use this at the bottom, but I do provide another link or button to the product. Because at this stage people are generally looking to see the actual product.

Other Great Features

This plugin is really very simple to use. That is an important factor for me, because I don’t have time to spend learning all the nuances of plugins.

It is also Mobile Responsive, which is crucial in this day and age of tablet and mobile phone use.

There are also options to add widgets to your pages and post, including a great summary widget for your latest or best reviews in the sidebar:

Using the WordPress Reviews Plugin

Just to give you a quick rundown of how easy WP Reviews  is to use, and what power you have over the plugin settings, here is some quick information.

Review Settings

The admin panel appears at the bottom of the post and the screenshot below shows you what it looks like.

The only slightly complex part I found was the Criteria Section where you can  add specific areas of review (like: usability, appearance, value for money).

These items need to be added one by one in a list, with a ID (simple name), actual Title (what appears in the review) and a rating in %.

This feature is a great way to show your user what criteria you used to give your overall rating and what your thought about various aspects of the product.

Tips: 

• Make use of the default settings mentioned below to set up your reviews (see General Settings)
• If you have a long title for one item, add it last so it fits better. I found I had to delete and add them all again when I put a long title in the middle (to me it looked untidy).
• Add a simple shareable image to your review (not too large or it takes over the post)

General Settings

The makers of this plugin have thought about a lot and made it easy to administer this plugin too.

You can preset values like:

• Currency for all products
• More Details Button (text and color)
• Default Criteria values (if you use these all the time)
• Other minor things that you want to show/hide (author name, review date etc)

Other Review Plugins and Options

If you purchase the package of plugins from Author H Reviews, you also get

• Author H Review an alternative for showing reviews (I used to use this one, but WP Reviews is better)
• WP Rich Snippets (this is more focused on a variety of Rich Snippets review, worth checking out)
• All In One Schema is a very basic way of adding schema to almost any website (check out the video below)

There are other options in the WordPress Plugin directory but I have not found one I personally liked or would recommend.

Final Thoughts

This plugin has made my reviews stand out on Google and on my website with no design knowledge and little effort.

If you promote a lot of products or want to get that extra mile out of reviews you have done in the past, this is one worth the money.