WP Review Slider Pro Review: Display Facebook, Google, And Yelp Reviews On WordPress

If you run any kind of business, reviews are essential to getting people to trust you.

In a survey from BrightLocal, a whopping 85% of surveyed consumers said they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. And when it comes to trusting reviews, that same survey shows that consumers trust these three sources the most:

• Yelp
• Facebook
• Google

So if you want to show your business in the best light possible, showcasing your business’ real reviews from those sites is a great way to build trust with your visitors.

WP Review Slider Pro is a plugin that helps you create a stylish grid or slider that displays your reviews from all three of those services, as well as giving you the option to manually input your own reviews as well.

In my WP Review Slider Pro review, I’ll go hands-on and show you how the plugin works and what it can help you do.

In general, I’m impressed with how easily you can import and showcase reviews with the plugin.

WP Review Slider Pro Review: What The Plugin Does

First off, WP Review Slider helps you automatically import reviews from the three most trusted review sites:

• Facebook
• Google
• Yelp

Beyond those three, you can also manually enter reviews, though I think it looks much more trustworthy to embed the actual reviews because it proves the review is real.

All of these reviews are stored in your actual database, which eliminates the need to query external services for each page load.

Then, because you probably want some control over the actual reviews that you display on your site, WP Review Slider Pro lets you filter and moderate the reviews to only choose the best ones.

And once you have your reviews, you can create a custom review template to dictate how your reviews will actually look on the front-end. You can insert this review template either via shortcode or an included widget.

If needed, you can also create multiple templates to show different reviews/review styles at different spots on your site.

Hands-on With WP Review Slider Pro: Using The Plugin

Once you install and activate WP Review Slider Pro, you’ll need to complete some setup steps before you can start displaying reviews.

This isn’t the plugin’s fault – it’s just a result of the fact that the plugin automatically pulls in reviews from Facebook and Google, so you’ll need to create a Facebook App and get a Google API key before you can start using the plugin.

I’ll skip showing you how to do that because the plugin already links to detailed instructions from its interface:

Fast forward a few minutes and I’ve put in all my credentials, so let’s get started!

Importing Reviews From Facebook

Once you add your credentials, you’ll be able to import reviews via different methods depending on the specific service.

For Facebook, you can only import reviews from pages that you’re an admin of:

You also have the option to automatically import new reviews by enabling the Auto Download Cron option.

None of my personal pages have reviews, so I won’t be able to actually import any. But based on my experience with Google and Yelp, I trust that everything works correctly.

Importing Reviews From Google

With Google reviews, you’re able to import reviews from any business. To find a business, you can click the Click to Find Location button and enter your desired business.

I’ll choose one of my favorite restaurants from when I lived in Philadelphia:

Once you select your location, the plugin will automatically fill in the Location and Place_id information (you can also do this manually if needed).

You can also pull reviews from multiple locations at the same time, which is helpful if your business has…multiple locations.

And finally, you can also specify a minimum rating and choose whether or not to auto-fetch new reviews as they’re added:

Once you click Retrieve Reviews, the plugin will save them to your WordPress database, rather than externally querying them for each page load (that’s better for performance!):

Importing Reviews From Yelp

The process for importing reviews from Yelp is the simplest – literally all you need to do is paste in the URL to the Yelp page and configure some other basic settings:

Note that you cannot combine Yelp reviews with other review types in the same display slider. Again, this isn’t the plugin’s fault, but rather a consequence of Yelp’s rules for displaying reviews.

Manually Creating Reviews

Finally, if you need to insert a review that isn’t on one of those three sites, you can also do it manually:

Viewing Your Imported Reviews

Once you’ve imported all of your reviews, you’ll be able to view them in the Reviews List interface. Everything that you see in the screenshot below was automatically pulled in by the plugin – I didn’t manually edit anything:

If you want, you can use the icons to:

• Hide a review
• Delete a review

And you can also edit minor details about the review, though you’re unable to edit the text or rating for imported reviews (which you shouldn’t be doing anyway).

Displaying Your Reviews On Your Site

Now that you’ve imported all of your reviews, it’s time to actually display them. To do that, you’ll need to create a template in the Templates tab.

There’s a lot to configure here, but in a nutshell, you’ll be setting up:

• How to display your reviews
• How many reviews to display
• Which reviews to display – you can either set up filters or select individual reviews
• Smaller details like Google Rich Snippets and image caching

And the nice thing is that you can clone/import/export these templates as needed, which is helpful if you’re working on multiple websites.

The plugin comes with 4 template styles that you can further modify using the other options or with your own Custom CSS:

Below that, you’ll choose more nitty-gritty display settings:

And then below that, you’ll actually choose which reviews to include. You can either use the various filters or choose specific reviews to display:

And at the bottom, you can configure two smaller details:

The Google Rich Snippets functionality is nice for getting those eye-catching star ratings in Google organic search results.

Then, once you save your template, you can either grab the shortcode or use a widget to display your reviews:

And that’s it! You’ll be able to see your reviews on the front-end like this:

And here’s another look at what you can do with some styling:

All in all, it’s pretty painless to start displaying your reviews!

How Much Does WP Review Slider Pro Cost?

You can find limited free versions for each individual review website at WordPress.org:

• Facebook
• Google
• Yelp

As for WP Review Slider Pro, there are three different prices depending on how many sites you want to use the plugin on:

• Single site – $19
• 3 sites – $39
• Unlimited sites – $99

Final Thoughts On WP Review Slider Pro

Trying to manually display reviews on your website sucks. My friend asked me to help add reviews to his restaurant’s website and while I was able to get something cooking with the regular embed code, I would’ve much rather used something like WP Review Slider Pro.

The plugin worked without a glitch and made it easy to import reviews from all the specified review sites.

Once imported, the reviews are easy to manage and display using templates. And you can create multiple templates as needed to display different reviews in different places.

If you need to display reviews from Facebook, Google, or Yelp on your WordPress site, definitely give this one a look.

Get WP Review Slider Pro