What is a review widget?
By Zyff
Short answer
A review widget is a small block of code you paste into your website that displays customer reviews pulled from somewhere else — usually a Google Maps listing, a Facebook Page or a set of testimonials you have collected yourself. It renders on your page, in your styling, and updates when the underlying reviews are refreshed.
The point of one is that it is live rather than copied. A screenshot of a five-star review is out of date the moment you take it and cannot be verified by the reader; a widget links each review back to its original, which is both more persuasive and, for Google and Facebook content, a condition of being allowed to display it.
How a review widget actually works
Nearly all of them share the same three-part shape. A builder collects your configuration — which business, which layout, which reviews to show. A server fetches the reviews from the source and stores a copy. A small script on your page asks for that stored copy and paints it into a container you have placed.
The stored copy matters more than it sounds. A widget that asked Google or Facebook directly on every pageview would be slow, would break whenever the upstream service was busy, and — in Google's case — would be billed per request to whoever built it. Serving from a cache is what makes a review widget free to embed on a page that gets real traffic.
What a review widget is not
It is not a way to collect reviews. A widget displays what already exists on your Google listing or Facebook Page; getting more reviews is a separate job, though a good widget will at least include a button pointing visitors at the place they can leave one.
It is also not a source of star ratings in Google search results. Marking up reviews you have gathered about yourself with star-rating structured data is self-serving review markup, and Google treats it as a violation that lands on your domain, not on the widget vendor's. A widget that offers to add review schema to your page is offering you a risk, not a feature — which is why Zyff's widgets deliberately emit no structured data at all.
The three kinds you will meet
They differ mainly in where the reviews come from, and that decides what you can and cannot control.
- Platform widgets (Google, Facebook) — authoritative and unarguable, because the reader can click through to the original. You cannot edit the text, and you are limited to whatever the platform returns.
- Testimonial widgets — reviews you collected yourself, by email or a form. Full control of the wording, and correspondingly less weight with a sceptical reader.
- Aggregator widgets — several sources combined into one wall. Good for volume; be wary of any that invent a combined star rating no individual platform publishes.
Google Reviews Widget
Show your real Google reviews on your site in 6 layouts.
Also asked
- What does a review widget do?
- Why use a review widget instead of screenshots?
All of these have the same answer, so they share this page rather than each getting a near-identical one of their own.