Ratings & Reviews plugin for WordPress

Ratings & Reviews – Star Ratings, Multi-Criteria Reviews & Photo Reviews for WordPress

Ratings & Reviews adds a complete review system to any post type on your site – posts, pages, WooCommerce products, directory listings or your own custom types. Visitors rate on a scale you choose, score several criteria at once (Value, Service, Cleanliness), attach photos, and write with a formatting toolbar, all from a front-end form that never reloads the page. You get a score summary with a rating breakdown, review lists that visitors can filter and sort, list, grid and masonry views, a photo slider, a reviewer’s dashboard, moderation through the WordPress queue you already know, and structured data so your stars can show up in search results. Every element is a Gutenberg block, an Elementor widget, a WPBakery element and a shortcode.

Live demo: reviews.salephpscripts.com

Ratings on Any Post Type

One checkbox list in Settings decides what your visitors can rate.

• Pick your post types – tick posts, pages, WooCommerce products, directory listings or any public custom post type, and reviews switch on for all of them at once.
• Automatic placement – the reviews block appends under the content on every enabled type, or turn that off and place it by hand exactly where you want it.
• Rating with the title – show the score with the post title in listings and on the single view: the full scale under it, or a single icon beside it.
• Ratings without a review – a score can exist with no text at all. It counts toward the average without adding an empty card to the list.
• Per-item off switch – one checkbox on any post’s edit screen disables ratings and reviews for that item alone. Existing reviews are kept, never deleted.
• Fast averages – the average, the counts and every criterion’s mean are stored on the item itself, so badges and rating sorts stay quick on large sites.

The Rating Scale

One setting decides how every score on the site looks.

• 3 to 10 points – set the maximum score anywhere from 3 to 10.
• Half-point ratings – visitors rate in half steps and averages read to one decimal.
• Change the scale safely – every rating is stored with the scale it was given on and re-rendered into whatever scale is current, so moving from 5 stars to 10 keeps every old score honest instead of distorting it.
• 593 icons, not just a star – pick the symbol your scores are drawn with from a bundled Font Awesome set: a car for cars, a bed for hotels, an apple for venues.
• Colour and size – set the icon colour and pixel height site-wide, and override the size on any individual placement.
• Two display modes – the full icon row, or a single icon beside the number wherever a score is read rather than chosen.
• Live score while rating – icons grow under the pointer and show the value about to be given, half steps included, so nobody has to guess what a half-filled star means.

Multi-Criteria Ratings

Ask for several scores per review instead of one overall star.

• Any number of criteria – Value, Service, Cleanliness, Comfort, Running costs. Visitors score each on its own icon row and the overall average combines them.
• Criteria per post type – every post type gets its own set on its own tab. Cars get Reliability and Performance, hotels get Cleanliness and Location, products get Quality and Value.
• Icon and colour per criterion – each criterion can carry its own icon and its own colour.
• One change re-skins everything – an empty icon or colour falls through from the criterion to the post type to the global setting, so you can restyle a whole post type without touching a single criterion.
• Criteria by taxonomy term – restrict a criterion to chosen categories, so a “Wine list” score only appears on restaurants. Criteria that do not apply drop out of the form, the cards, the breakdown and the overall mean.
• Rename and reorder freely – criterion IDs are stable and never reused, so historic ratings always resolve to the right criterion.
• Safe removal – removing a criterion that already holds ratings asks first, and can deactivate it rather than destroy the data behind it.
• Averages on the summary – each criterion’s mean shows beside the overall score, with its own icon and colour.

The Reviews Block

One shortcode or block puts the whole thing on a page: summary, list and form.

• Score summary – the average, the total number of reviews, a rating breakdown histogram with bars and counts, and the per-criterion averages.
• Rendered on the server, then hydrated – the first page of reviews is already in the HTML, so the block is fast for visitors and readable by crawlers, and nothing is fetched until somebody interacts with it.
• Load more – the list pulls in the next page in place, without a reload.
• Every part is optional – hide the score, the histogram, the criteria, the dates, the author names, the votes, the form or the list itself, and do it differently on each placement.
• Responsive – the block, the grid, the slider and the dashboard all reflow on phones and tablets.

Review Lists, Grids and Sliders

Gather reviews from across the whole site and show them anywhere you like.

• Cross-item lists – collect reviews by item, by post type, by taxonomy term or by reviewer, and drop the result on a home page, a landing page or a sidebar.
• List, grid or masonry – grid at 2, 3 or 4 columns and one column on phones; masonry lets every card keep its own height. Grid rows align their titles so cards stop staircasing.
• Photo slider – reviewers’ photos as a scroll-snap carousel with arrows, dots, autoplay that pauses on hover, drag to scroll, five slide ratios and a cover or contain fit, each slide overlaid with the review title, author and stars.
• Photo collage on cards – review photos sized to the view, with a “+N” badge when there are more than fit.
• Full-screen lightbox – photos open in a viewer with keyboard, arrows and swipe, and it always opens the review’s full set.
• Word limit – trim long reviews to a set number of words on cards, or show them whole.
• Pager without a reload – the next page swaps in place and browser back and forward keep working.
• “Add a review” button – a button you can drop anywhere that scrolls to the form and focuses it, or links back to the item when the form is elsewhere.

Filter, Sort and Search

• Filter panel – visitors narrow reviews by star range, by whether they have photos, and by keyword.
• Standalone filters – place the panel anywhere on the page and it drives every review list on that page at once.
• Shareable filtered views – filters live in the URL, so a filtered view is a real, bookmarkable, linkable page.
• Sorting – newest, highest rating, most helpful, random, or by any single criterion (“Best Comfort”), offered by name in the editor dropdown rather than only as a typed attribute.
• Real keyword search – review text is indexed with a MySQL FULLTEXT index, so searching is relevance-ranked instead of a slow scan.
• Default order – choose which order reviews arrive in out of the box.

Front-End Submission

A React form on the front end, with no page reloads anywhere in it.

• Instant validation – the form submits over the REST API and shows errors beside the field that caused them.
• Star input per criterion – the overall rating and every criterion get their own icon row, each with a “Clear rating” control.
• Rich text or plain – a formatting toolbar with bold, italic, underline, links and lists, or a plain text box. With formatting off, the editor bundle is never even fetched, so the page stays lighter.
• Anonymous reviews – let visitors without an account review, with name and email fields on the form. Their email is never shown publicly.
• Reviews per person – cap how many reviews one person may leave on one item, or allow unlimited.
• Rating now, words later – somebody can leave a score on its own and add the text afterwards from their dashboard.
• Clear outcome – after submitting, the reviewer is told whether the review is live or waiting for approval, and can write another one when that is allowed.

Photo Reviews

• Drag and drop – reviewers drop photos onto the form and see thumbnails before they submit.
• Your rules – set how many photos a review may carry (zero disables uploads entirely), the maximum size of each file in KB, and which formats are accepted: JPEG, PNG, WebP and GIF.
• Guests handled separately – photo uploads from people without an account stay off until you switch them on.
• Nothing orphaned – photos travel with the submit itself, so an abandoned form never leaves stray files behind in your media library.

Helpful Votes and Comments

• “Was this helpful?” – readers vote a review up or down, the counts show under it, and any list can sort by them.
• Comments on reviews – with per-review pages turned on, readers can reply to a review in its own comment thread.

Moderation and the Admin Side

• Hold new reviews – every new review waits for approval before it appears.
• Re-moderate edits – a published review returns to the queue when its author edits it.
• Guests always moderated – anonymous reviews always wait for approval, whatever the other switches say.
• The queue you already know – reviews use native WordPress statuses, so the Pending, Published and Trash views, the counts and the bulk actions all behave exactly as expected.
• Editors only – only administrators and editors can moderate reviews. An ordinary author can never approve their own.
• Sortable columns – the reviews list shows the reviewed item, the score and the votes and sorts by them, and one click from any item shows just that item’s reviews.
• Reviews column on your content – every enabled post type’s list gains a Reviews column with the count and the average.
• Full review editing – change a review’s target, its overall and per-criterion scores, its anonymous author details and its photos.
• One box per item – every reviewed item’s edit screen carries a paginated list of everything ever rated or written about it, with bare scores editable and deletable right there.
• Bulk reset per item – delete every rating-only entry, or trash every review, for one item in a single click.

The Reviewer’s Dashboard

A “my reviews” page your visitors manage themselves, with no access to WordPress admin.

• Everything they wrote – a logged-in visitor sees all of their reviews on one page, with Load more.
• Inline editing – they edit the title, the text, the ratings and the photos without leaving the page, using the submit form’s own photo picker and the same per-review limit.
• Delete – they remove their own review, which goes to Trash rather than being destroyed.
• Status at a glance – each card reads Published, Awaiting moderation or Draft, and updates if an edit sends the review back to moderation.
• Back to the item – every card carries the reviewed item’s thumbnail and links straight to it.

Page Builders, Blocks and Widgets

Nineteen elements, one definition, three editors.

• Gutenberg blocks – eight content elements (reviews block, rating summary, submit form, rating badge, reviews list, reviews slider, review filters, my reviews) and eleven single-review elements, previewed live in the editor with the front-end stylesheet and your colour palette loaded into the canvas.
• Elementor widgets – the same elements in their own panel groups.
• WPBakery / Visual Composer elements – the same elements again, in the Visual Composer element list.
• Sidebar widgets – reviews list, slider, filters, rating badge and rating summary as classic WordPress widgets.
• They can never drift apart – all three editors are generated from one element spec, so an option added in one appears in every other. The sidebar widgets are the fourth surface onto that same spec, narrowed to the five elements that suit a sidebar.

Per-Review Pages and SEO

• A page per review – optionally give every review its own URL nested under the item it reviews, for example /events/robotics-summit-2026/reviews/great-time/, rendered in that item’s own template and built from the ten single-review elements.
• Rich results – reviewed items publish aggregate rating and review structured data, so stars can appear in search results.
• No competing schema – where WooCommerce or Web 2.0 Directory already describes the page, the rating is added to their node instead of a second one fighting it.
• Meta for review pages – a review’s own page gets a description and Open Graph and Twitter tags that describe that review, not the item.
• Works with your SEO plugin – Yoast, Rank Math, All in One SEO, SEOPress and The SEO Framework are corrected through their own filters, so tags never double up.
• Crawl budget – filtered and re-sorted views are marked noindex, follow, so a crawler is not walked through thousands of near-identical URLs.

WooCommerce

• Proper placement on products – the reviews block renders through a WooCommerce single-product hook, right after the summary, instead of being buried in the Description tab or lost entirely when a product has no long description.
• Product rich results – your ratings are added to WooCommerce’s own product structured data, so a shop that collects reviews here still publishes a rating rather than none at all.
• Its own criteria – products get their own criteria set, separate from the rest of the site.

Web 2.0 Directory

• Reviews as a listing element – reviews become a placeable element in the directory’s own listing builder, positioned exactly where you drop it.
• Ratings on cards, popups and markers – listing cards, map popups and map markers can all show the score.
• Search and sort by rating – visitors filter and sort directory listings by their rating.
• A tab on the directory dashboard – members manage their reviews from a “My reviews” tab inside the directory dashboard.
• Listing rich results – the aggregate rating is attached to the directory’s own business schema.

CSV Import, Export and Bulk Tools

A batched React wizard over the REST API, with sessions that survive a restart.

• Batched import – bring reviews in from a spreadsheet in resumable batches, so a large file never times out.
• Create or update – import new reviews, or update existing ones matched by their review ID.
• Reviews, ratings or both – import full reviews, bare scores with no text, or a file that mixes the two.
• Rich column mapping – the item, author, text, date, status, overall rating, per-criterion ratings, votes, photos and captions.
• Photos from a ZIP or from URLs – attach review photos by uploading a ZIP alongside the CSV or by pointing at image URLs, optionally converting them to WebP as they land so the library stays small.
• Deferred thumbnails – skip thumbnail generation during a big import to make it much faster, then regenerate later with a resumable tool.
• Resume – an interrupted import picks up where it stopped instead of starting over, and every row it could not use is reported with the reason.
• Export – export reviews, standalone ratings, or both in one round-trippable file, choosing the columns on a review export.
• Demo content – generate realistic demo reviews with photos across the post types you choose, to see the plugin working before the real reviews arrive.
• Dedupe and reset – find and remove reviews an import created twice, or clear every review for a clean slate.

Email Notifications

• Three emails – a new review to the admin, an edited review to the admin, and an approval notice to the review’s author.
• Editable everywhere – every subject line and every body is yours to write, with placeholders for the reviewer, the review and a link to it.
• Individually switchable – turn any one of the three off without touching the others.
• Delivery test – a button sends a real message through the plugin’s own mailer, so you find out mail is broken before your customers do.
• HTML with a plain-text fallback, sent from the address you choose.

Anti-Spam

• Google reCAPTCHA v2 and v3 – the checkbox challenge or the invisible score version, your choice.
• Guests only – logged-in reviewers are never challenged.
• Key diagnostics – a “Run diagnostics” button checks your keys against Google from the settings page, so you know they work before a visitor finds out they do not.
• Anonymous uploads off by default – people without an account cannot attach photos until you allow it.

Colour Customisation

• Palette presets – Default, Turquoise, Orange, Red, Yellow, Green or Gray, or set the colours yourself.
• Seven colours – primary, secondary, link, link hover, two button colours and button text.
• Applied as CSS variables, so one change cascades through every front-end component at once.
• Blends with the host product – on a site running Web 2.0 Directory or Rocket Maps, reviews inherit that product’s palette until you set your own.

Shortcodes

• [webrr] – the full reviews block for one item: summary, list and form.
• [webrr-summary] · [webrr-form] · [webrr-filters] · [webrr-rating] · [webrr-dashboard] – each piece on its own, placed wherever you want it.
• [webrr-reviews] · [webrr-slider] – list, grid, masonry and photo-slider views of reviews gathered across items.
• [webrr-post-rating] · [webrr-post-reviews-counter] · [webrr-post-ratings-overall] · [webrr-add-review-button] – per-item badges, counters and a call to action.
• [webrr-review-page] and the [webrr-review-*] family – header, title, reviewed item, text, overall rating, criteria, gallery, votes, comments and edit link, for building the single-review page by hand.
• The pre-rename spellings [w2rr-form], [w2rr-summary], [w2rr-filters], [w2rr-rating], [w2rr-dashboard] and [w2rr-reviews] stay live as aliases, so pages authored before the rename keep rendering untouched.

Performance

• Zero-request first paint – the first page of reviews ships inside the HTML, so nothing is fetched until a visitor actually interacts.
• Assets only where needed – scripts and styles load only on pages that really render a review element.
• Result cache for heavy sorts – sorting by rating, votes or a criterion is cached as a window of ordered IDs and shared by every list on the page, and it expires the moment a review changes.
• FULLTEXT search index – keyword search runs against a dedicated index table instead of scanning post content.
• Duplicate-proof ratings – the database itself refuses to record the same person’s rating on the same item twice.

Setup, Upgrade and Diagnostics

• Eight settings tabs – General, Rating scale, Rating criteria, Submission & moderation, Email notifications, Images, Customization and Diagnostics. Everything is in one panel.
• Diagnostics – a Run button probes your live front end over a loopback request and names the third-party plugin most likely to be breaking the runtime, the shortcodes, the REST API, the form bundle or the review post type.
• Upgrade from 1.x in place – an existing Ratings & Reviews 1.x install keeps its reviews, its settings and its customised email templates, and a batched importer that is safe to re-run moves the rest.
• Quiet updates – schema and default upgrades apply on their own after a file update, with no deactivate and reactivate cycle, and they never overwrite settings you have saved.
• Licence and updates – enter your purchase code once and get plugin updates, with a “Check for updates now” button beside it.

Translation & Compatibility

• Translation-ready – ships a complete .pot file; load your .mo and every front-end string, on the server and in the interactive block alike, is localised.
• No English flicker – every string in the reviews block is translated on the server, so a translated page never flashes back to English the moment it becomes interactive.
• WooCommerce – reviews on products, with the rating added to Woo’s own product schema.
• Web 2.0 Directory – reviews, rating search, rating sort and a dashboard tab inside the directory.
• Fully responsive – the block, the lists, the grid, the slider, the form and the dashboard all reflow gracefully on phones and tablets.
• WordPress 6.0+ and PHP 7.4+.

What’s Included

• Ratings & Reviews plugin (all features above).
• Demo content generator with a sample review set and a matching image pack.
• A complete .pot translation file.
• 6 months of item support.

Requirements

• WordPress 6.0 or higher.
• PHP 7.4 or higher.
• WooCommerce (only if you want reviews on products).
• Web 2.0 Directory (only for the directory integration).
• Google reCAPTCHA keys (only if you switch the anti-spam challenge on). Keys are stored on your server only and are never sent to us.
• If you are running Ratings & Reviews 1.x, deactivate it first. Version 2 replaces it in place and adopts its existing data.