What makes website ratings crucial for your site?

Customer website ratings serve as a crucial trust element and sig­ni­fic­antly influence user behaviour. Positive reviews can increase the con­ver­sion rate, while negative ratings provide valuable feedback and highlight op­tim­isa­tion potential. Ratings are es­pe­cially credible when they are trans­par­ent, up-to-date, and come from verified customers.

Why are website ratings important?

Customers and website visitors often gain important in­form­a­tion through reviews and customer website ratings, allowing them to gauge the opinions of other users before investing money in a product, service, or business. Since a product can’t be phys­ic­ally inspected online as it can in a store, testi­mo­ni­als help bridge this in­form­a­tion gap. While online shopping is con­veni­ent, practical, and fast, it also involves distance. For this reason, potential customers often feel uncertain about the quality and benefits of online offerings.

If a website contains ratings or a comment box, this distance can be bridged: Customers help each other with pur­chas­ing decisions through reviews and provide insights into the function, scope, and added value of a product. Of course, rating the website itself or com­ment­ing on non-com­mer­cial content is con­ceiv­able and useful. Simply having the option to rate signals that you take your users’ desires seriously—this builds trust. Ad­di­tion­ally, you engage your website’s visitors when you allow com­ment­ing on offers or content.

Through the website ratings on your site, you also receive important feedback: Do the products meet ex­pect­a­tions? Are the contents engaging and do they truly offer added value? This in­form­a­tion is crucial for the ongoing op­tim­isa­tion of your website and your offerings.

What are the different types of website ratings?

Customer website ratings can take various forms, from basic star ratings, similar to a school grading system, to comments in feedback boxes and in-depth reviews. Some websites also let users express their opinions through icons, such as thumbs-up or thumbs-down. The key rating mech­an­isms include the following:

• Star ratings: They allow users to express their opinions with just a click. The five-star website rating system has become the standard on the internet. While one star rep­res­ents the lowest score, a full five stars is the usual highest mark.

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• Upvotes/downvotes: This website rating system has similar pros and cons to star ratings: it provides a very quick and straight­for­ward method for user feedback, but it doesn’t offer an op­por­tun­ity to delve deeper. There’s only a scale of ‘like’ vs ‘dislike’—the ‘why’ remains un­answered.
• Comments: Comments answer the question of ‘why’ in a website rating. They give users the op­por­tun­ity to provide a brief ex­plan­a­tion. Sug­ges­tions and im­prove­ment requests can also be expressed.

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• Reviews: Reviews are primarily offered for products in online shops. Most notably, Amazon has built an im­press­ive and con­tinu­ously growing review archive for a wide range of products, thanks to its large user base.

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As shown in the last example, there’s a button labelled ‘helpful’. Amazon provides the option to write detailed reviews and to mark them as ‘helpful’ or ‘not helpful’. This in­tro­duces a system for meta-ratings, serving a critical function: it prevents abuse of the review feature and es­tab­lishes a control mechanism. Another element that builds more trust in this example is Amazon’s system, which re­cog­nises and verifies the purchases of reviewers.

Best practices for customer website rating systems

The examples show that there are numerous ways to implement a website rating system. These do not have to be mutually exclusive and can easily be combined. The Amazon example il­lus­trates this: the review is also linked to a five-star rating of the item.

Ad­di­tion­ally, there is an option to rate the actual review using comments and the ‘like’ system. From these examples, several best practices can be derived:

• Reviews, ratings, and comments must be authentic and truly come from customers.
• You should not delete or hide negative reviews. Instead, it is valuable to respond to the feedback ob­ject­ively and offer polite as­sist­ance.
• Encourage users to provide feedback and actively seek in­ter­ac­tion. A higher number of customer website ratings suggests that your offering is very popular.
• The website rating feature must be easy to find and straight­for­ward.
• It may be be­ne­fi­cial to reward the effort and highlight active reviewers.
• Regularly analyse the website ratings, comments, and/or reviews. Only when you take criticism seriously and actually learn from it can you improve the quality of the offering and the user ex­per­i­ence.

How can website ratings be in­teg­rated into a site?

Depending on the type of review system, there are various ways to integrate website ratings into sites: The easiest option is through built-in features of shop and content man­age­ment systems (CMS). Many systems have such a feature by default or at least offer sep­ar­ately in­stall­able plugins for ratings. Ad­di­tion­ally, there are straight­for­ward generator tools that auto­mat­ic­ally generate the necessary HTML code with a few clicks. The code can then be copied and embedded. Moreover, star ratings can also be written manually.

Plugins

There are practical all-in-one solutions for most CMS and shop systems that offer multiple different review systems such as stars, points, circles, or similar icons. Many tools also enable rich snippets in Google SERPs. In­stall­a­tion is typically very easy, depending on the CMS, and the range of possible plugins spans from free to more com­pre­hens­ive premium solutions. For the world’s most-used CMS, WordPress, there are countless such rating and review plugins.

Plugin solutions are a practical approach for most CMS due to their universal ap­plic­ab­il­ity, extensive func­tion­al­ity, and wide avail­ab­il­ity. Ad­di­tion­ally, they are generally easy for beginners to integrate into a website, depending on the plugin and CMS.

Generator tools

If you’re looking for a simple solution for website ratings and prefer not to write the code yourself, you can use a generator tool. An example of such a tool is the Easy Icon Editor from Noun Project. With this tool, you can easily customise existing star icons online. The code is auto­mat­ic­ally generated, which can then be copied. In addition to standard star icons, you can also upload and use your own graphics.

You also have the option to adjust the text or the number of stars. However, due to limited cus­tom­isa­tion options, such solutions are often only an al­tern­at­ive for very simple websites. Another issue with many of these solutions is that the backend often requires extensive setup (e.g., via a special PHP script) to save user inputs.

Writing code by hand

Of course, you can also write the code for ratings on your website by hand. For a simple star system, you can implement a rating scale with five se­lect­able stars using HTML, CSS, and some JavaS­cript. The stars can be displayed as SVG graphics or Unicode char­ac­ters and made clickable. JavaS­cript saves the selected rating (e.g., in a form field), which can then be processed or stored server-side. If you want to display dynamic ratings with feedback or average values, this can be achieved with database con­nectiv­ity (e.g., MySQL) and server-side logic (such as PHP, Node.js, or Python).

A simple example of a CSS class for a star rating system might look like the one shown below. However, this code only handles the display of a star rating—a script to capture user inputs and store them is still missing.

1  .rating {
2      unicode-bidi: bidi-override;
3      direction: rtl;
4  }
5
6  .rating span {
7      display: inline-block;
8      width: 1.1em;
9      font-size: 2.8em;
10      color: #ccc;
11      cursor: pointer;
12      text-shadow: 0 0 1px #666;
13  }
14
15  .rating span:hover,
16  .rating span:hover ~ span {
17      color: gold;
18      text-shadow: 0 0 5px #e2e2e2;
19  }
20
21  .rating span:active,
22  .rating span:active ~ span {
23      color: yellow;
24  }

Display reviews in Google SERPs

Star ratings on your website have another advantage: if you implement them using schema.org, the ratings can also appear in Google SERPs as rich snippets. This way, they act as eye-catchers even before customers visit your page, po­ten­tially gen­er­at­ing more traffic. In the following screen­shot, a search for the six-time Oscar-winning film ‘La La Land’ was conducted on Google. The SERPs show the following entry from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) with the average user rating on a scale from 1 to 10, a graphical rep­res­ent­a­tion as a star rating, and the number of votes submitted:

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Once all an­nota­tions have been im­ple­men­ted according to schema.org, you can use various tools like the Google Struc­tured Data Testing Tool to view a preview. This way, you can quickly see if everything is properly annotated and displayed correctly.