User ratings are everywhere. Every popular eCommerce site provides user ratings for their products. Question and answer sites like Quora and StackOverflow identify the best answers by relying on user ratings. Books, movies, businesses, and even college professors are ranked on the basis of user ratings.
There are lots of different types of WordPress sites that might want to incorporate user ratings. A WordPress-powered ecommerce site is the most obvious application, but certainly not the only scenario where ratings might come in handy. Here are a few other potential applications for user ratings to get your creative juice flowing:
- Blogs that publish user-submitted content can use ratings to make the best content stand out.
- Sites that post product or service reviews can use ratings to add a clear visual representation of the rating to their review of a product or service. We do that on this blog. As a matter of fact, you can see an application of this technique later in this post.
- Business websites can add ratings to their product and service pages so that users can express their support for their favorite products and services.
- If you’re really feeling confident, you can add a rating system to your own blog posts so that readers can rate the quality of your content.
In this article, we’ll take a look at a popular star-rating plugin: Rating-Widget: Star Review System. I’ll show you how to use it, and then rate it on a scale of one-to-five stars – because obviously, we have to rate a rating widget. Then, I’ll point out some solid alternatives for you to consider if you want to add user ratings to your site and aren’t sold on Rating-Widget: Star Review System.
What is Rating-Widget: Star Review System?
Rating-Widget: Star Review System (referred to as Rating-Widget moving forward) is a freemium WordPress plugin. It claims to be the most popular five-star rating system on the web and the free version of the plugin available at WP.org boasts more than 10,000 active installs. The plugin is also available for a variety of other website platforms, including Blogger, Tumblr, Squarespace, Shopify, Wix, and as a jQuery widget.
With the free version of the plugin, you can add ratings to posts, custom post types, pages, and comments. In addition, the developer states that Rating-Widget is compatible with WooCommerce, BuddyPress, bbPress, and can be used with multisite networks.
In other words, with Rating-Widget you can add customizable star ratings to virtually every piece of content on a WordPress website.
How to Use Rating-Widget: Star Review System
Head to Plugins > Add New, search for “Rating-Widget”, and click Install Now. Once installation is complete, activate the plugin.
Next, select the RatingWidget item in the admin menu. You will need to connect your WordPress site to the servers that host the Rating Widget service. Click Ok – I’m in! to connect your site and a confirmation email will be sent to the email address associated with your user profile:
If you don’t receive the email verify that the email address in your profile is the one you’re checking. If necessary, change the email address in your profile, go back to RatingWidget, and select the option to resend the confirmation email. Once you receive the confirmation email, click the button in the email to activate the plugin.
Add Ratings to Posts, Pages, and Comments
With the plugin activated, go to RatingWidget > Settings. The settings menu has four different tabs:
- Blog posts: use this tab to control ratings on posts.
- Front page posts: use this tab to control how ratings are displayed on the page designated as the posts page in the Settings > Reading menu. By default, posts are shown on the front page, but if you set another page as the posts page, the settings in this tab will apply to the page you have selected.
- Comments: configure comment ratings.
- Pages: use this tab to control ratings on pages.
Start with the Blog Posts tab and set up the rating criteria that will apply to blog posts. With the free version of the plugin you can create up to three criteria that will be automatically averaged into a summary rating:
If you want to remove the info bubble encouraging users to “Rate this” select the checkbox below the rating criteria to Hide Info Bubble. If you are using the ratings to enable author ratings, select the checkbox for Author Rating (read-only for visitors). That way, the post author will be able to add a read-only rating to their post.
Scroll down to the RatingWidget Options section to define the presentation of the rating widget. Make a note of the Advanced Settings options where you can control colors, layout, type, and more.
If you keep scrolling down you will see additional options to control which users can vote on ratings, how frequently users can vote, and the pages where the ratings should be displayed. Adjust these settings to your liking.
The end-result will look something like this:
The Front Page Posts tab offers up the same options as the Blog Posts tab, so I won’t cover them in detail. However, if you do use blog post ratings, I would suggest setting the front page ratings to Read Only and using just a single criteria and label:
By using these settings, the front page will just display the summary rating, and visitors will have to visit the blog post to add their own rating:
By default, comment ratings are set up to display a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down rather than a 5-star rating, in most cases, you will want to either disable comment ratings or leave the default settings intact. In any case, you can make any necessary adjustments in the Comments tab.
The settings in the Pages tab are identical to those on the Posts and Front Page Posts tabs. Use the Pages tab to determine how ratings should be displayed on your site’s pages.
