Universal Reviews – Ratings, Forms Reviews, Listing Reviews

Mô tả

Universal Reviews is a WordPress review plugin that lets visitors rate and review anything on your site, and gives you one clean place to manage what they say.

Run a WooCommerce shop? A local business? An agency, a course, a directory or a membership site? You probably want the same few things: a simple review form, honest star ratings, a queue to approve reviews, and a good-looking way to show them. This plugin does exactly that, without turning your comments section into a rating system.

Reviews can be attached to posts, pages, custom post types, WooCommerce products, taxonomy terms, users or your whole business. Show them with Elementor widgets, Gutenberg blocks or shortcodes, whichever you prefer.

Reviews live in their own indexed database tables instead of the comments table or post meta. Rating summaries are precomputed, so your review lists and summaries don’t run a COUNT(*) on the reviews table for every page view.

Show your Google reviews too. Connect your own Google Business Profile and display recent Google reviews next to the reviews you collect yourself, with a shortcode, a block or an Elementor widget. Google Reviews is optional: nothing contacts Google unless you set it up, and Universal Reviews is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Google.

Free features

• Review Forms & Field Builder — Drag-and-drop form builder with 12+ field types, photo uploads, and per-review-type rules. Import and export templates as JSON, and preview before publishing.
• Review Types — Define Product, Service, Place or any custom type, each with its own moderation policy and schema.org type. Choose whole or half-star rating scales per type.
• Moderation Dashboard — A focused React-powered queue to approve, reject, reply to and manage incoming reviews. Filter, search, sort and bulk-action across large review collections.
• Anti-Abuse Protection — Honeypot, signed time trap, per-IP rate limiting and duplicate-submission blocking — no CAPTCHA required. Sensible defaults out of the box, fully configurable.
• Elementor & Gutenberg — Native Review Form and Reviews List widgets/blocks with live previews and style controls. Shortcodes also available for any theme or page builder.
• Display & Schema.org — Star-rating summaries, filtering, helpful votes, owner replies and verified badges on the front end. AggregateRating JSON-LD output for real search-result rich snippets.
• Google Reviews (optional) — Connect your own Google Business Profile with OAuth (your own Google Cloud project; tokens are encrypted) and show up to 50 recent Google reviews from one location, refreshed daily, with a rating summary, Load more, display options and a Google attribution line. Use the [unirev_google_reviews] shortcode, the Google Reviews block or the Google Reviews Elementor widget. Shown from a temporary local copy (kept for at most 30 days), so visitors never trigger a Google request. Disconnect any time to delete it.
• Built for performance — Dedicated indexed database tables and precomputed rating totals, with server-side filtering and pagination. Stays fast even with large review collections.

Pro Features

adds 9 premium modules on top of everything above.

• Templates — 10 ready-made review forms for shops, restaurants, hotels, events and more. Import any template into a working form in one click.
• Social-Proof Widgets — A floating rating badge for every page, plus a reviews carousel block/shortcode. Server-rendered from a cached summary, so it appears instantly with no layout shift.
• Analytics — Server-side event tracking (created, approved, rejected, replies) with per-day charts. No visitor tracking or cookies involved.
• Migration — Move existing WooCommerce product reviews or rating-carrying comments into Universal Reviews. Batched, resumable, and safe to re-run.
• Webhooks — Signed JSON deliveries for every review event, retried automatically on failure. Full delivery history, with per-endpoint auto-disable after repeated failures.
• AI Assist — AI-generated summaries, sentiment scoring and reply drafts for your reviews. Reviewer names are never sent, and API keys are encrypted at rest.
• Review Requests — Invite customers by email with single-use links that prefill the review form. Track sent, opened and completed requests from one screen.
• Sources — Import reviews from any HTTPS JSON feed, with field mapping and deduplication. Scheduled syncs run safely in the background.
• More Google Reviews — Grid layout with 2–4 columns, carousel, card styles, star colour and rating filter, up to 500 reviews per location, and up to 25 Google locations with a location choice per block, shortcode or widget.

Set it up in about three minutes

1. Install and activate the plugin.
2. Open Reviews in the admin menu and look over Forms, Review Types and Settings. The defaults are sensible.
3. Edit a post, page or product and add [unirev_reviews show_form=1], or drop in the Reviews List block, or use the Reviews List widget in Elementor.
4. Visit the page, leave a test review, then approve it under Reviews → Reviews.
5. Optional: open Reviews → Google Reviews to connect your Google Business Profile and show your Google reviews too.

You now have a rating summary, a review list and a review form on the page.

Who is it for?

• Online stores that want customer reviews and star ratings on WooCommerce product pages.
• Local businesses and service providers who want reviews of the business itself, including their Google reviews.
• Agencies, freelancers and course creators collecting testimonials.
• Directories and membership sites where people review listings, users or categories.
• Elementor and block-editor users who want review widgets that match their design.

The everyday workflow stays simple:

1. Create or adjust a review form.
2. Place the form and review list on your site.
3. Moderate incoming reviews.
4. Reply, feature or verify reviews when appropriate.
5. Show the rating summary and approved reviews to visitors.

Elementor widgets

If you build with Elementor, you don’t need to paste shortcodes any more. Universal Reviews adds two Elementor widgets:

• Review Form – let visitors submit a rating and review right from your Elementor page.
• Reviews List – show approved reviews with the rating summary, star filters, owner replies, a “Load more reviews” button and helpful votes.

Both widgets use the same forms, review types and moderation queue as the shortcodes and blocks, so you can switch between them at any time. Elementor is optional. The plugin works the same without it.

Support and community

• Support Forum – ask questions and report issues.
• Facebook Community – share feedback and follow updates.

Collect reviews

• Create review forms with a drag-and-drop field builder.
• Rating field is included by default and uses a 1–5 star scale, in whole or half steps per review type.
• Let reviewers attach photos (JPEG, PNG, WebP or AVIF) with configurable size and count limits. SVG is never accepted.
• Available field types include rating, heading, text, textarea, select, radio, checkbox, number, email, URL, phone, date and hidden fields.
• Mark fields as required, use half-width layouts, add placeholders and help text, and assign custom CSS classes.
• Add headings and text blocks between fields with configurable HTML tag, size, color and alignment.
• Custom field answers are saved with the review and available to moderators.
• Import and export form templates as JSON.
• Preview forms before publishing them.
• Create review types such as Product, Service or Place, each with its own moderation policy, allowed targets and schema.org type.

Protect submissions

Universal Reviews includes several layers of basic anti-abuse protection without requiring a CAPTCHA.

• Honeypot field.
• Signed time trap with an expiring token.
• Per-IP rate limiting.
• One-review-per-person-per-item protection within a configurable time window.
• Consent checkbox.
• Same-site origin validation.
• Validation of review types and public targets.
• HTTP 429 responses when the configured rate limit is exceeded.

Default protection includes a limit of 12 submissions per 60 minutes per IP and a 72-hour duplicate-review window.

Moderate reviews

The React-powered admin dashboard gives moderators a focused place to work through incoming reviews.

• Filter reviews by status.
• Search and sort reviews.
• Cursor-based pagination for large review collections.
• Approve, reject, mark as spam, trash, feature or delete reviews.
• Apply moderation actions individually or in bulk.
• Reply to reviews as the site owner.
• Mark reviews as verified.
• View the original form answers.
• Keep a review change history.
• Receive a daily digest when reviews are waiting for moderation.
• Disable the digest with the unirev_digest_enabled filter.

The moderation interface uses server-side filtering, sorting and pagination so the browser does not need to load the complete review database.

Display reviews

Add reviews to your site with Elementor widgets, Gutenberg blocks or shortcodes.

Available shortcodes:

[unirev_form]

[unirev_reviews]

[unirev_summary]

The Reviews List and Review Form blocks are server-rendered. In the block editor you get a live preview, a dropdown of your saved forms, a searchable picker for posts, products, terms and users, and colour and size controls for the button, fields and star rating.

Front-end features include:

• Rating summary with average rating and total review count.
• 5-to-1 star distribution.
• Star-rating filtering such as 4+ stars.
• “Helpful” vote button on each review.
• “Load more reviews” button for long review lists.
• Photo reviews with image thumbnails.
• Owner replies.
• Verified review badges.
• Keyboard-friendly star selection.
• Inline validation and form status messages.
• Loading and success states.
• Theme-friendly CSS variables using the --unirev-* naming system.

Plugin CSS and JavaScript are loaded only on pages that actually show a Universal Reviews widget, and in the page head when a post contains the shortcode or block, so your layout doesn’t jump.

SEO and structured data

Universal Reviews can output AggregateRating JSON-LD (the review schema behind star ratings in search results) for supported public review targets.

Structured data is printed only when the page actually displays the target’s review list or summary and the target has approved reviews. The plugin uses the schema.org type configured for the review type and avoids outputting review structured data for private content.

This keeps structured data tied to the content visitors can actually see rather than adding review markup site-wide.

Schema output is built to play nicely with other plugins: it uses the correct worst rating for half-star types, a stable @id, merges multiple reviewed items into one @graph, limits types to a list of valid schema.org types (filter unirev_schema_types), and has a unirev_schema_output filter so you can avoid duplicates with WooCommerce or your SEO plugin.

Important: structured data does not guarantee rich results in search engines. Search engines decide whether and how eligible structured data is displayed.

Performance

Universal Reviews is designed for larger review collections.

• Reviews use dedicated database tables.
• Important review, moderation and lookup queries are indexed.
• Rating totals and distributions are precomputed.
• Public review lists and summaries do not run COUNT(*) on the reviews table for every page view.
• Background jobs support retry, cancellation and recovery from stuck jobs.
• Jobs and logs older than 30 days are automatically purged.
• Optional persistent object caching such as Redis or Memcached can make repeated public queries cheaper, but it is not required.

The architecture is intended to remain practical as a site grows from hundreds of reviews to much larger collections.

Import, export and diagnostics

The Tools area includes:

• Streaming CSV export.
• Streaming JSON export.
• Spreadsheet formula-injection protection during export.
• Batched CSV import with up to 5,000 rows per file.
• Row-level import errors.
• Background jobs.
• Job retry and cancellation.
• Logs.
• Database table-size diagnostics.
• Automatic cleanup of old jobs and logs.

Privacy

Privacy controls are built into the review workflow.

• Reviewer IP addresses are not stored by default.
• WordPress privacy exporter integration.
• WordPress privacy eraser integration.
• Custom form answers are included in privacy handling.
• Erasing personal data anonymises reviewer name, email and IP where applicable while keeping the review text as a business record.
• Optional data-retention settings.
• Review data remains after deactivation.
• Data is deleted on uninstall only when “Delete all data on uninstall” is enabled.
• Multisite sites manage their own uninstall-data setting.
• No telemetry is sent by the plugin.

Always configure retention, consent and privacy settings according to your site’s legal and business requirements.

External services

Universal Reviews works fully offline. The only external service it can contact is Google, and only if you choose to connect Google Reviews (Reviews → Google Reviews). Nothing is sent to Google, and no Google code is loaded, otherwise.

When you connect Google Reviews, your server contacts these Google endpoints using your own Google Cloud project and the Google account you authorize:

• accounts.google.com and oauth2.googleapis.com — OAuth 2.0 sign-in, token exchange, token refresh and token revocation. Data sent: your OAuth Client ID/Secret, the authorization code and your tokens.
• mybusinessaccountmanagement.googleapis.com, mybusinessbusinessinformation.googleapis.com and mybusiness.googleapis.com — the Google Business Profile APIs, used to list the accounts and locations you manage and to read reviews for the location you select. Data sent: your access token and the account/location IDs.

Requests happen when you press Sync Now, during the daily scheduled sync, and while you set up the connection — never when a visitor loads a page. If a reviewer has a Google profile photo, visitors’ browsers load that image from Google’s image servers (googleusercontent.com).

Google’s terms: https://policies.google.com/terms — privacy policy: https://policies.google.com/privacy — Business Profile API terms: https://developers.google.com/my-business/content/terms

Google Reviews

Show recent reviews from your Google Business Profile next to your own reviews. Google Reviews is optional and never required for the rest of the plugin.

What you need

• A Google Business Profile you own or manage (verified and active).
• Your own Google Cloud project with the Business Profile APIs enabled and API access approved by Google. Google requires each business to use its own approved project, so Universal Reviews does not ship a shared one.
• An OAuth client ID of type “Web application” with this authorized redirect URI: https://your-site.example/wp-admin/admin-post.php?action=unirev_google_oauth (the exact URL is shown on the setup screen).

Setup

1. Open Reviews → Google Reviews.
2. Enter your Google Client ID and Client Secret and click Save Credentials.
3. Click Connect Google, sign in with the Google account that manages the business, and approve access.
4. Choose a location. The first sync runs immediately.

Changing the Google account or credentials: open Reviews → Google Reviews and use Change Google account, Edit Client ID & Secret or Disconnect. These are also available on the location screen, so a failing Google request never leaves you stuck. Signing in with a different Google account clears the previous location and its cached reviews.

Free plan limits: one connection and location, up to 50 recent reviews displayed, daily automatic sync plus Sync Now, a basic list layout and basic styling. If your profile has more reviews, only the allowed number is displayed and a note is shown to administrators; the connection keeps working. Multiple locations, higher limits, advanced …

[unirev_reviews show_form=1]