Review widget for your website: types, setup and SEO

What is a review widget?

A review widget pulls reviews from wherever they are collected, usually a review platform, and displays them inside your page. Because it reads from the platform when the page loads, a new review appears on your site without you editing anything. Most widgets are a script tag plus a marker that says where the widget goes.

Types of review widget

Badges and star summaries give trust at a glance; carousels and grids show what people said. Product review widgets tie reviews to the item a visitor is looking at, which is where review markup matters most (see SEO below).

What to look for in a review widget

• Where the reviews come from. A widget is only as useful as the reviews behind it. Check whether the platform labels how each review arrived, for example whether it was invited or matched to an order. Our verified reviews guide explains what those labels mean.
• A fair selection. UK law treats "giving greater prominence to positive consumer reviews over negative ones" as publishing reviews in a misleading way (DMCC Act, Schedule 20). A widget that only lets you pick five-star reviews puts that risk on you.
• Loading behaviour. Look for a script that loads asynchronously, is light, and is served from a cache, so it does not hold up the rest of your page.
• No layout jump. The widget should take a fixed amount of space, or let you reserve it, so content does not shift when it appears.
• Readable text. Ratings and review text should be real text, not only an image, so screen readers and search engines can read them.
• Privacy. Check whether the script sets cookies or calls other services, because that can affect your cookie notice.
• Mobile layout. Most visitors will see it on a phone; check it there first.
• Structured data. Find out whether the widget adds review markup, what type it uses, and whether that fits Google's rules for your kind of page.
• Price and terms. Note whether the widget is on the free plan, whether pricing is per domain, and whether the contract is monthly or annual. Our Yotpo alternatives and Trustpilot alternatives pages compare published prices.

How to add a review widget to your website

1. 1
   Pick your review source. Decide which platform's reviews you want to show and make sure you have some published there.
2. 2
   Choose a layout. In the provider's dashboard, pick the widget type and set colours, size and how many reviews it shows.
3. 3
   Copy the embed code. This is usually a script tag and a short HTML element that marks where the widget appears. Some providers give one combined snippet.
4. 4
   Paste it into your page. Put it in your site's HTML, or in your site builder's custom code block, at the spot where the widget should appear. If the provider says the script belongs in the page head or before the closing body tag, follow that.
5. 5
   Publish and check. Load the live page on a phone and a desktop, confirm the reviews appear, and confirm nothing else on the page moved or broke.
6. 6
   Test what Google sees. Run the page through Google's Rich Results Test or URL Inspection and look at the rendered HTML, which is what Google says to use for JavaScript content (Google1).

Adding a widget on common site builders

The menus differ between platforms and change over time, so treat this as the general route and follow your platform's help pages for the exact steps.

• WordPress: add a block that accepts custom HTML where the widget should go and paste the snippet in, or use the provider's plugin if it has one. A script that must go in the page head needs a theme setting or a plugin that adds head code.
• Shopify: if your review provider has a Shopify app, it can place the widget on product pages for you. Otherwise, paste the snippet into your theme code or a custom content section.
• Squarespace, Wix and Webflow: each has an embed or custom code element you can place on a page, and a site-wide setting for code that loads on every page. Check that your plan includes custom code.
• A hand-built or framework site: paste the snippet into the template where it should render. If your site sets a content security policy, allow the provider's script and data addresses.

Review widgets and SEO

Google can see widget content. Google renders pages in "a headless Chromium" that "executes the JavaScript", and "uses the rendered HTML to index the page". It flattens shadow DOM content, and "If the content isn't visible in the rendered HTML, Google won't be able to index it." If a file is blocked by robots.txt, "Google Search won't render JavaScript from blocked files or on blocked pages" (Google).

Markup can come from a script, with a caveat for products. Google says you can "use JavaScript to generate the required JSON-LD and inject it into the page", but warns that "dynamically-generated markup can make Shopping crawls less frequent and less reliable" (Google). For merchants, it recommends "putting Product structured data in the initial HTML for best results" (Google).

Reviews of your own business, on your own site, are not eligible for stars. Google's review snippet guidelines say that when an entity controls the reviews about itself, its pages using LocalBusiness or Organization markup "are ineligible for star review feature", including when the reviews appear "through an embedded third-party widget" (Google). Google explained the change in 2019 (Google blog). That rule names LocalBusiness and Organization; reviews of a specific product, app or course use other types, such as Product, SoftwareApplication or Course.

The reviews must be on the page. Google says marked-up review content must be "readily available to users from the marked-up page" (Google), and "Don't mark up content that is not visible to readers of the page" (Google).

Where to place it and how to keep it honest

• Put reviews next to the decision they support: product reviews on the product page, a badge near the price or sign-up button.
• Keep a widget below your main content, so the page does not wait for it.
• Show recent reviews, and let visitors reach all of them through a link to your full profile.
• Do not hand-pick only good reviews. Beyond the UK rule above, the US FTC rule bans presenting displayed reviews as "most or all the reviews" when reviews are suppressed "based upon their ratings or their negative sentiment" (16 CFR 465.7), and the CMA warns against selectively promoting positive reviews (CMA208, para 4.3).
• Reply to reviews on the platform. Replies show visitors how you handle problems.

GoldStarred's badge

GoldStarred's badge shows visitors your GoldStarred rating with a link to your public profile, so they can read every review behind it. It is free on every plan, including Free, and you add it by pasting one snippet of code from your dashboard into your site. It works on any site that accepts custom code, without a plugin, and the script is cookie-free. For pages or emails where scripts cannot run, there is also a linked image version.

For products, apps and courses, Growth, at $17 a month, adds reviews for up to 25 items, each with its own widget and the Google markup that makes that page eligible for star ratings, and Pro, at $37 a month, makes that unlimited across up to 5 websites. Product widgets work automatically: paste one snippet, and each product is added the first time its widget loads on your verified site. Prices exclude VAT and sales tax; every plan is monthly with no per-domain fee.

We make GoldStarred, so weigh this section with that in mind. For a side-by-side, see GoldStarred vs Trustpilot.