Review sites are great for both shoppers and affiliate marketers. Affiliates do the research and compare and review the products then present their findings to buyers in a way that helps buyers make the right choices.
If this is what you want to do with your review site using WordPress, then you are in the right place.
Types of Review Plugins
There are a few different categories of review plugins and themes
Category #1: The Big Boys of Review Plugins
These are review plugins that do everything! They can help you build a review and/or comparison site from start to finish. These give your site the ability to accept user ratings, create comparison tables, allow you to give products editor rating, sort products by various criteria, and much more.
The best in this category is by far MyReviewPlugin (full review | tutorial). Other plugins don’t even come close.
You would choose a plugin in this category if you want to build a review site with minimal coding and lots of features. As you can see in this tutorial, I built a complete and beautiful review site using MyReviewPlugin with almost no coding at all.
This category also includes WF Review (full review), wpReviewEngine (full review), and WP Review Site (full review).
Compare the top three review plugins here.
Category #2: The Specialized Review Plugins
These plugins focus on a single specific aspect of the review site. For example, the plugin GD Star Rating will let you give posts editor star ratings and also allows your commenters to give posts star ratings, so it works very well as a products ratings plugin. WP Comparison Charts allows you to display professional product comparison tables on your site. Combine GD Star Rating with WP Comparison Charts and you’ll have a site with star ratings and cool product comparison tables.
This “specialized review plugins” category also includes ReviewAZON (full review) and WP Zon Builder (full review) — both of these products allow you to import products from Amazon, review them, rate them, and have your visitors provide ratings. You’d choose one of these if your affiliate review site focuses on Amazon.
Category #3: Review Site Themes
These aren’t standalone plugins like the ones mentioned in the first two categories. These are themes with review site functionality built into them.
They provide comparison tables and user and editor ratings, but their appearances cannot be changed (because you can’t theme a theme!). In this category, I like the looks of DailyWP Review Engine Theme (not to be confused with wpReviewEngine, which is not a theme but a plugin). This category also included the reviewsPRESS theme (full review).
Note that if you’re interested in review themes specifically, the big boys plugins (i.e. MyReviewPlugin, wpReviewEngine, and WF Review) all come bundled with theme packages.
Compare the Best Three WordPress Review Site Plugins
I formulated a criteria for assessing review site plugins. The plugins are rated based on how well they help an affiliate marketer build a review and comparison site. The assessment led me to picking these three plugins:
| Recommended | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| MyReviewPlugin | wpReviewEngine | WP Review Site | |
| Download here | Download here | Download here | |
| Install | Straightforward. No workarounds required. | Easy. But DRM may cause issues during installation | Straightforward. No workarounds required. |
| Support & docs | Complete user-manual & docs. Ticketing system. Email & IM support | Complete user-manual & docs. Email & IM support | Partial user-manual. Email & forum support |
| Fits in any theme |  | | |
| Comparison charts | Yes, horizontal and vertical. | Yes, but only horizontal. | Yes, but only horizontal. |
| User reviews | Yes, with "Was this review helpful?" feature | Yes | Yes |
| CSV import | | |  |
| Google Maps | | | |
| Microformats | | | |
| Product sorting |
|
|
|
| Bayesian weighting | | | |
| Included themes | 8 | 2+ | 2 |
| Refund period | 45 days | 30 days | |
| Cost | 1-site: $90 Unlimited sites: $130 | 1-site: $99.95 Unlimited sites: $169.95 | 1-site: $97* Unlimited sites: $199* Developer: $299* |
| Download here | Download here | Download here |
Just wanted to let everyone know, MyReviewPlugin 6.0 is out. We were already the best: now we’re even better.
If you’re interested, you can read about some of our improvements here: http://blog.myreviewplugin.com/16/myreviewplugin-6/
I really like a WP Comparison Charts Plugin (for $19 0r $39)… it will be certainly useful for my blog. But, are there a free version for such kind of plugin? Hehe.
In Amazon, users can submit reviews, which in turn can be commented on by other users. Do any of the review systems tested here have that capability?
Thanks!
You can use WordPress threaded comments feature to simulate this. For example, to reply to you, I pressed the “Reply” button. This button could have been labeled “Comment on A.Z.’s review”. And whatever I wrote could have been hidden until a link is clicked to load my comment (like Amazon). But the plugins reviewed here have nothing to do with this, except for allowing for the initial review comment with star rating.
M.K., Thanks so much for your insight! What a great a solution! So I guess that would work for any of the above plugins, right?
Yeah, pretty much. But if you’re gonna choose one of the plugins anyway, I recommend MyReviewPlugin because it has “Was This Review Helpful?” feature, which maybe useful for what you’re trying to do.
Hi,
I was looking for rating and review system and thanks to this post I got the information I needed.
But have some open questions:
- I like the forum/topic structure of bbpress.org. Is any of these plug-in ready to use with it? So users will rate the topic instead of a post. If not I guess I could use the category to create a similar structure, right?
- Are they compatible with plug-in that enable to comment with facebook or twitter login? or they need to create a user for this? Same question applies to bbpress.org users
Thanks again for the info
Hi Daniel,
None of the plugins here is made for bbPress topic ratings. You’ll have to find a plugin that’s specifically made for bbPress, like this one. I’m not sure about how you’d create a category to allow topic rating through these plugins.
As for compatibility with Facebook and Twitter logins, it shouldn’t be a problem. The plugins on this page will work with that.
Thanks for this review, I bought MyReviewPlugin after reading this. It took a few seconds to install, and a bit of time to configure. But in the end it works great and looks great. Basically posts are products, and comments are reviews. The included themes are great as well.
Thank you for your feedback Yabo and I’m glad you’re enjoying MyReviewPlugin. It’s a great solution!
Do any of these allow the users to create reviews of products not currently listed? I have an active user base that would like to review certain products. I do not need this to make money with, and I am not looking to pre-populate it with collections of reviews from elsewhere. Is it possible to allow users to add a new product to review with WP or would this be impossible?
Thanks in advance.
Hi billbo, None of these solutions do exactly what you’re describing. You will probably need a custom solution for that. But do you really want to allow your users to create new posts/reviews on your site, with each post in a new URL? Inaccurate posts, duplicate posts, spam posts, etc may require heavy moderation. On the other hand, if you use MyReviewPlugin for example, you can create a post for every product that you want to allow your users to review, then your users can post reviews and star ratings as comments.
Thanks for your reply.
I understand what you are getting at but that is the problem, I have no idea what it is they want to review. I mean, I know the category.
Let’s say its something along the lines of reviewing car dealerships that they have done business with. Even if they sent me a link for dealerships, with even a small readership that will get too unwieldy very quickly. I thought about creating something using a wiki installation, but I don’t have a clear cut road map for that in my head either.
We don’t really have the money for custom right now either, unfortunately.
Again, I appreciate your help.
It would be a little difficult to accomplish without any custom development. But if you’re willing to tweak and play with the code yourself, then it might be possible.
For example, there is this plugin, TDO Mini Forms, which allows users (even non-registered ones) to post to your WordPress site. Combined with GD Star Rating, this could give you the final result you intend to have.
Great, thanks for the helpful advice. I will give it a look.
billbo, let me know if you were able to figure out how to do what you were talking about. I’m also looking for the capability of allowing the users to post products and reviews.
Mate, at the end of your article you’re putting a comparison chart between:
MyReviewPlugin, wpReviewEngine and WP Review Site. What plug-in are you using for this?
Please.. Would appreciate your quick feedback
Hi Mario, This table is plain HTML. I made the design and CSS.
MyReviewPlugin (and, I think, WP Comparison Charts both) can also make comparison tables that can be styled similar to this one. My sources tell me the upcoming version of MyReviewPlugin will have powerful comparison tables. I can’t wait to see it.
What exactly do you like about the table that’s shown on this page?
Thanks,
MK
I like the rounded-corners in the top.. Do any of the previously mentioned plug-ins include this feature?
Hmmm, for a review plugin to support that, it would have to place CSS classes in the first column and the last column of the table, so that the user can style the corners. Once the classes are placed, styling the columns with CSS is pretty easy.
Unfortunately, currently none of the plugins provide those CSS classes, but this comments thread is monitored by some plugin developers, so we might see this feature in future versions of the plugins.
It’d be just awesome!
Thanks M.K.
Consider it done. I’ll add it in to the new MyReviewPlugin charts functionality in 6.0, but if anyone needs it in 5.0′s comparison tables, let me know via email!
Mark.
Thanks Mark!
Hey, this is Mark, the lead developer of MyReviewPlugin.
I just wanted to let you know that WP Review Engine does distribute (at least) 2 themes with their software, not only one. Just a little mistake in the table.
It might also be worth mentioning that WP Review Site charges $24 extra for the editor’s rating functionality (they call it “My Ratings”) included in MyReviewPlugin and WP Review Engine.
Mark.
Hi Mark, I just edited the table. Thanks for the corrections and for replying to the other comments!
How can this be integrated into WordPress 2.7 comments ?
As there is no “foreach” anymore.
Thanks.
“this” being what, and which “foreach”?
Anyway, 2.7 is really old at this point. I doubt you’ll find voluntary support for it.
Hi final,
At MyReviewPlugin, we do this automatically for users by making use of the comment_text and comment_form hooks.
Similarly, if a user wants, they can make use of the hooks provided by WordPress themselves to do a manual integration or to do extensive comments modification they can use the callback provided by the wp_list_comments function, see here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_list_comments
The new way WordPress does comment output is a little bit frustrating, but with some understanding of hooks it is just as powerful as before.
Mark Edwards.
Lead Developer,
MyReviewPlugin.com
we are looking for a ratings/review system that would allow us to install on our client websites where their customers can rate/review them and then google would pick that up and help populate throughout its search engine.
is this what these review engines do? we’re not looking for a side by side product or company comparison review but a rating/review system to install so the company can be reviewed/rated.
Make sense? Can these you reviewed support just that?
Thanks in advance and look forward to your reply.
It can be done with GD Star Rating plugin (mentioned above). For example, see how a page within GDStarRating.com has the aggregate number of ratings in the search results.
Customers will rate the post, and then leave a review (as a comment). GD Star Rating will mark-up the rating results so that Google can pick it up and display it in the search results.
Thanks M.K – appreciate your support. Have a blessed day!
By the way, I contacted the developer of MyReviewPlugin and he confirmed that the plugin does have the feature that you’re looking for.
I wanted to confirm for M.K. that MyReviewPlugin *does* support microformats (hReview, hProduct and RDFa:Review — though for most users just hReview is all they need/want) or as Google calls them “rich snippets.”
Mark,
MyReviewPlugin.com
I think GD rating is also good!
GD Star Rating is mentioned as one of the alternative solutions.
By the way, this page has been updated. I merged the alternative solutions with this one. It’s all in one page now and includes GD Star Rating plugin.
Which one is best for a web hosting review site?
They all can do web hosting reviews.
WPReviewSite has a demo which is a web hosting review site. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that WPReviewSite should be your final choice. MyReviewPlugin and wpReviewEngine both can do hosting review sites as well.
So, read the full reviews of the plugins, see which one meets your needs best, and choose. Good luck!