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 that you can use today.
WordPress Star Rating Plugins on CodeCanyon
There are currently about 75 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.
Best Star Rating Plugins on CodeCanyon
Here is a brief review of the best star rating plugins that you can buy on CodeCanyon:
Stellar—Star Rating Plugin for WordPress
Stellar 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.
Testimonials Showcase WordPress Plugin
This plugin gives you an easy way to display testimonials, reviews, and quotes from users in an attractive layout.
It is ideal for situations where you have to display testimonials from your clients and customers. You can also use it to display reviews for different products on your website.
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.
BNE Testimonials Pro
You can use the WordPress BNE Testimonials Pro plugin to display testimonials and reviews anywhere on your website.
The testimonials and reviews are made up of multiple elements like a featured image of the person or company writing the review, the actual review content, and additional fields for the name, website link, and the rating from the reviewer.
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.
Gravity Forms Star Rating Field
This Gravity Forms Star Rating Field plugin allows you to add star rating fields to all your Gravity Forms.
You can choose from 14 different styles for the star rating field. There are also some other customization options like showing the current rating value on hover or click and showing some custom rating text in tooltips. Customize the rating label and the value saved in the database.
Contact Form 7 Star Rating Field
This Contact Form 7 Star Rating Field plugin offers the same functionality provided by the previous plugin. However, it has been developed for Contact Form 7.
This lets you add star rating fields to any of your Contact Form 7 forms. There are 12 different customization options available.
It 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.
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.
It comes with a long list of features. For example, the plugin works perfectly with right-to-left (RTL) languages and cache plugins. You can also edit previously submitted ratings, allowing people to change their reviews at a later date.
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.
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.
This plugin offers a lot of options for displaying the testimonials on the site. You can also create your own custom layout to showcase the testimonials based on some predefined templates.
The plugin 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 2020.