How do I add reviews to my website?

The default for any business with a Maps listing, because Google reviews carry the most weight with a reader who has never heard of you. The practical ceiling is that Google returns at most five reviews per request and gives no way to ask for others, so widgets accumulate them over repeated refreshes rather than displaying a complete history.

Worth doing if your audience found you on Facebook, and useful precisely because it is a different set of people from your Google reviewers. One wrinkle to expect: Facebook retired star ratings in 2018 and replaced them with a yes-or-no recommendation, so a page with no legacy rating has a percentage of people recommending it rather than a score out of five. A widget that draws five stars anyway is inventing a number nobody gave.

The right answer when your customers will not leave a public review but will happily send you an email saying something generous — common in B2B, consulting and anything with a long sales cycle. You control the wording, the ordering and the photograph, which is both the advantage and the reason a reader discounts them slightly.

Attribute them honestly: a name, a role and a company that can be checked is worth several anonymous raves. Never write one yourself.

Stacking a Google widget, a Facebook widget and a testimonial wall on one page works well, and each block being visibly from a different source is part of why. What does not work is merging them into a single averaged star rating, which is a number no platform publishes and you cannot substantiate.

The other thing to avoid is adding review structured data to the page. Marking up reviews about your own business with aggregate-rating properties is self-serving review markup — an explicit Google violation, and a manual action taken against your domain rather than the widget's.