9 Best Star Rating Plugins for WordPress in 2021 (Compared)

Are you looking for the best star rating plugins for WordPress?

Adding star ratings to your website lets your customers review your products and services while improving your social proof.

In this article, we’ll share the best star rating plugins for WordPress, so you can simply add star ratings to your WordPress website.

Why Use a Star Rating Plugin for WordPress?

A star rating plugin lets you simply add customer and client reviews to your website with built-in star ratings.

The star rating system is incredibly popular and allows your visitors to see the quality of your products and services at a glance. Star ratings act as social proof for your website visitors.

By default, WordPress does not have a built-in star rating feature, but you can easily add this with a WordPress plugin.

With a star rating plugin, you’ll be able to collect and display star ratings across your WordPress website. You can even display your star ratings with customer testimonials and reviews.

That being said, let’s take a look at some of the best star rating plugins for WordPress.

1. WPForms

WPForms is the best WordPress form plugin in the market used by over 4 million WordPress users.

Not only is it the most beginner friendly form plugin, it also comes with many powerful features such as the ability to let users submit ratings through your forms.

You can easily add a star rating field to any of your forms. Simply select the Ratings field within the drag and drop form builder.

You can couple your star ratings with a testimonial form using the Testimonial Form Template within the Form Templates Pack addon.

This helps you collect ratings, reviews, and testimonials all in one place.

2. Facebook Social Reviews Feed – Smash Balloon

Facebook Social Reviews Feed by Smash Balloon lets you display social reviews with a star rating from your Facebook page on your website.

If you have a ton of great reviews on your Facebook business page, then you can simply add these to your site and improve social proof.

The Custom Facebook Feed Pro plugin is the most popular Facebook feed plugin and lets you simply add a Facebook page feed to WordPress.

The Reviews extension lets you display your starred Facebook reviews and testimonials by adding a shortcode to your site.

Note: to use the Facebook Reviews extension, you need to purchase the Custom Facebook Feed Pro plugin.

3. Site Reviews

Site Reviews lets your visitors submit star ratings between 1 and 5 stars. When you display your ratings on your site, this plugin lets you to pin your best reviews to the top, so your visitors see them first.

There’s a built-in approval system, so you can moderate ratings before they go live on your site. This prevents spam and unfair reviews from being posted and negatively impacting your business.

You also have the option to require users to log in before they’re allowed to post a star rating.

With this plugin you can quickly respond to reviews, display reviews and star ratings across your website, and more.

4. All in One SEO

All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is the best SEO plugin for WordPress in the market. It offers the most comprehensive SEO toolkit to help you improve your rankings without difficulty.

It includes a setup wizard that’ll automatically help you choose the best SEO settings for your website.

AIOSEO also includes product review schema markup, which allows you to add star ratings that show up in the search results.

Displaying rich snippets will improve your search engine appearance and help you get more traffic to your website.

5. Easy Testimonials

Easy Testimonials lets you enter user testimonials and reviews with a star rating from your WordPress dashboard. This is very useful if you’re using a plugin like WPForms to collect star ratings.

There are tons of entry options that let you customize each review like, the star rating, the product or service they used, the person’s name, email, and even company role.

The free version has multiple themes and blocks you can use with the WordPress block editor to display your starred reviews. Or, you can use the included shortcode to simply add reviews to your website.

6. YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews

YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews expands and improves the existing WooCommerce review section.

The standard WooCommerce review area lets users submit a basic review and star rating. But, since reviews act as social proof and are more important than ever, you’ll want to improve this area.

This plugin essentially transforms your WooCommerce review section into an Amazon review section. Your customers will be able to add a review title and attach images, along with a star rating.

You’ll also be able to display the total number of times a certain star rating was submitted for each product.

7. Rate My Post

Rate My Post is a unique plugin that lets your visitors submit a star rating to your posts and pages. This is a great way to obtain feedback about what you’re writing, so you can improve.

When a user submits a star rating, they can also send you private feedback about the rating they gave.

This plugin gives you the option to display the star review before your post, to act as social proof for future readers.

It’s also equipped with a detailed stats section, so you can see which posts your readers like the most. You can even use the included top posts widget to display the posts with the highest star rating in your sidebar.

8. WP Product Review Lite

WP Product Review Lite is the best WordPress product review plugin. It comes with detailed product review settings, including adding a star rating for each product.

Beyond adding star ratings, you can add product features, pros and cons, add images, and more. You can also let users submit their own ratings and reviews of the product.

Adding a review is very easy. All you have to do is select the product review option when writing a blog post and fill out the review settings.

It also has a sidebar widget to display your product reviews and star ratings easily.

For more details, see our guide on how to make a niche review site in WordPress.

9. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is one of the best WordPress popup plugins and conversion tools. With this tool, you can create eye catching popups, countdown timers, floating headers, and much more.

Best of all, these can be customized entirely to deliver a targeted experience for your users, and you can add star ratings, user testimonials, etc inside your popups.

By delivering a completely customized marketing experience, you’ll easily elevate your conversions.

You can also use OptinMonster with the most popular WordPress form plugins and top email marketing services.

We hoped this article helped you find the best star rating plugins for WordPress. You may also want to see our list of the best push notification software for WordPress and our expert picks of the must have WordPress plugins for small businesses.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

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How to Easily Embed Instagram in WordPress (Step by Step)

Are you looking for an easy way to embed Instagram feeds on your WordPress website?

Embedding Instagram photos and videos on your website helps keep your content fresh, increases user engagement, and builds trust.

In this article, we will show you how to embed Instagram in WordPress, step-by-step.

Why Embed Instagram on Your WordPress Site

Showing content from your Instagram account on your WordPress website has a lot of benefits.

You can display product reviews, showcases, shoppable images, and other user-generated content in an Instagram feed as social proof to build trust and drive more sales.

It also helps improve the search engine optimization (SEO) of your site by keeping the content fresh and updated.

Aside from that, Instagram feeds are great for increasing engagement and keeping visitors on your website.

That said, let’s see how to embed an Instagram feed in WordPress.

How to Embed Instagram Feed with a WordPress Plugin

The easiest way of embedding Instagram feeds on WordPress is through a plugin.

For this tutorial, we will be using the free Smash Balloon Social Photo Feed. It is the best Instagram plugin for WordPress and allows you to display content from your Instagram account to your WordPress site in an instant.

There is also a paid version of the plugin called Smash Balloon Instagram Feed Pro. It offers more customization options like sort feeds based on hashtags, combine different feed types, show captions, likes and comments, and much more.

First, you need to install and activate the Smash Balloon Social Photo Feed plugin on your website. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

After activating the plugin, you need to visit Instagram Feed » Settings and click the ‘Connect an Instagram Account’ button under the ‘Configure’ tab.

You will see a popup where you can choose between a Personal or Business Instagram profile. For this tutorial, we will select the Personal option and click the ‘Connect’ button.

On the other hand, if you have a Business or Creator Instagram account, then you can select the ‘Business’ option to continue.

After that, you will have to log in to your Instagram account and click the ‘Allow’ button to let Smash Balloon access your profile information and media content.

You’ll now be redirected back to your website, where you’ll see a popup with your Instagram ID asking you to connect your account. To do that, click the ‘Connect This Account’ button.

Next, you should see your Instagram account connected to Smash Balloon.

After that, go to the ‘Customize’ tab and change the look and feel of your Instagram feed. For example, customize the width and height of the feed, and change the background color.

Other than that, Smash Balloon lets you choose the number of photos and columns to display in the feed. You can also select the padding around images, disable mobile layout, sort your images, and select image resolution.

If you scroll down, there are more options for customization. For instance, edit the header of your Instagram feed, enable the ‘Load More’ and ‘Follow’ buttons, change GDPR settings, and get a weekly feed issue report.

However, if you upgrade to the Pro version, there are additional customization features, like selecting a layout type, enabling caption, like and comments, post-filtering, and moderation.

After you are done editing the Instagram feed, click the ‘Save Changes’ button.

Next, Smash Balloon Social Photo Feed makes it very easy to embed Instagram anywhere on your WordPress blog.

To do that, edit or add a new post/page. In the WordPress editor, click the plus sign (+) to add a new block and search for ‘Instagram Feed.’

Smash Balloon will automatically load the Instagram feed and show you a preview in the content editor. You can now publish your post or page to display content from Instagram.

If you are using the classic editor, then you’ll need to use the shortcode [instagram-feed] where you want to display your Instagram feed.

Smash Balloon Social Photo Feed plugin also makes it very easy to add the feed in the sidebar. To do that, go to Appearance » Widgets, drag the Instagram Feed widget to your sidebar, and click the ‘Save’ button.

How to Add Instagram Feed Using Default Embed Blocks

If you are looking to embed an Instagram feed in your content using the default embed feature, then you’ll need to enable Instagram oEmbeds in the Smash Balloon Social Photo Feed plugin.

This is because you cannot directly embed content from Instagram or Facebook to your WordPress website anymore.

The feature was deprecated in October 2020 by WordPress, when Facebook required developers to register an app and use Access Tokens to get the data from their API for oEmbed content.

A simple solution to fix the oEmbed issue is by using the Smash Balloon Social Photo Feed plugin. Just go to Instagram Feed » oEmbeds from your WordPress admin area.

After that, click the ‘Enable Instagram oEmbeds’ button.

You will now see a popup where the plugin will ask you to ‘Connect to Facebook.’

Next, log in to your Facebook account and connect it with Smash Balloon.

After that, you can select Facebook pages that you want to use with Smash Balloon and click the ‘Next’ button.

An advantage of allowing Smash Balloon to use your pages is that your Access Tokens do not expire. You can skip this part, but your Access Token will only be valid for 60 days.

Next, you need to select what Smash Balloon can do with your Facebook page and click the ‘Done’ button. For example, you can allow the plugin to show a list of pages you manage.

After that, you should see a message saying you’ve now linked Smash Balloon social to Facebook. Now click the ‘Ok’ button to return to your WordPress admin area.

You will see a message saying that Instagram Feed will replace your old oEmbeds automatically and generate all new content for all new links.

Now, you can easily embed any Instagram content in your blog post or page.

Just go to your Instagram account and click the three dots (…) in the right top corner of any Instagram picture or video to open more options.

Next, click the ‘Copy Link’ button when more options appear in the popup.

After that, edit any post or page and click the plus (+) sign to the top left corner to add an ‘Embed’ block.

Now enter the URL of your Instagram content and click the ‘Embed’ button.

Once that is done, you can publish your post or page to see the Instagram feed on your website.

We hope this article helped you learn how to embed Instagram to your WordPress website. You might also want to go through our guide on how to choose the best website builder and proven ways to make money online blogging with WordPress.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

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How to Use WebP Images in WordPress (3 Methods)

Do you want to use WebP images in WordPress?

WebP images are a modern image format that offers better image compression by reducing the file size. This makes your website load faster and saves bandwidth.

In this article, we’ll show you how to easily use WebP images in WordPress.

What is WebP & Why Use WebP Images in WordPress?

WebP is a new file format for images to be used on the web. By using the WebP image format, your images will be 25-34% smaller in file size than PNG and JPEG without losing quality.

If images are slowing down your website, then converting them to WebP format can improve your page load speed test scores.

To learn more about image compression, see our guide on how to optimize images for the web.

Since WebP is a new file format, it is not yet supported by all browsers. However, most modern browsers like Google Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge support WebP images.

Should You Use WebP images in WordPress?

WebP images can help you speed up your WordPress website. It is a recommend best practice to be used along with a WordPress caching plugin, CDN, and more.

By default, WordPress doesn’t support WebP images and uploading a WebP image will show an error.

To fix that, you will need to use an image compression plugin to convert images into WebP image format. You’ll still upload your images in WordPress supported file formats like PNG, JPEG, and GIF, so that they can be used as a backup.

If your site uses lots of images, and they are slowing down your WordPress blog, then you should definitely consider using WebP images.

Here is how to use WebP images in WordPress. We’ll show you multiple methods, so you can choose one that works best for you:

• Using WebP Images in WordPress with EWWW Optimizer
• Using WebP Images in WordPress with WP Rocket
• Using WebP Images in WordPress with SG Optimizer

Method 1. Using WebP Images in WordPress with EWWW Optimizer

EWWW Image Optimizer plugin is one of the best WordPress image compression plugins that allows you to optimize your WordPress images. It also supports WebP Images and can automatically show them on supported browsers.

First thing you need to do is install and activate the EWWW Image Optimizer plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, go to the Settings » EWWW Image Optimizer page to configure plugin options. You’ll be greeted by a setup wizard, but you can click on the ‘I know what I am doing’ link to exit the wizard.

On the next screen, you will see a bunch of plugin options. Scroll down and check the box next to the ‘WebP Conversion’ option.

After that, click on the Save Changes button to store your settings.

Next, you need to scroll down to the WebP Conversion section. The plugin will now show you some rewrite rules with a red preview image.

You need to click on the ‘Insert Rewrite Rules’ button, and the plugin will automatically try to insert these rewrite rules to your .htaccess file.

If the plugin is successful in adding those rules, then the red image preview will turn into green with the ‘WebP’ text.

Sometimes, the plugin may not be able to insert the rules. In that case, you need to copy the rewrite rules from the plugin’s settings page and paste them at the bottom of your .htaccess file manually.

Once you’re done, return back to the plugin’s settings page and click on the Save Changes button again. If the preview image turns green, then this means you have successfully enabled WebP image delivery on your WordPress site.

Alternately, you can choose from JS WebP Rewriting or <picture> WebP Rewriting methods as your WebP delivery options. These are a little slower than the .htaccess method, but it will get the job done.

Bulk Convert Your Old Images to WebP Version

EWWW Image Optimizer allows you to easily convert your previously uploaded image files to WebP images. Simply go to Media » Library page and switch to the list view.

Next, you need to click on the Screen Options button and change the ‘Number of items per page’ to 999. If you have 1000+ images, then those images will appear on the next page.

This way you will be able to quickly select a large number of images for bulk optimization. Next, click on the Select All checkbox at the top to select all images.

After that, click on the Bulk Actions drop-down menu and select Bulk Optimize option. Finally, click on the Apply button.

On the next screen, the plugin will give you an option to skip the image compression and only convert them to WebP. You can check this option if your images are already optimized.

After that, click on the ‘Scan for Unoptimized Images’ button to continue. The plugin will then show you the number of images it found, so you can click on the Optimize button to proceed.

Your images will now be optimized, and EWWW optimizer will generate WebP versions for your images.

Testing Your WebP Image Delivery

Once you have optimized your images, you can go to a blog post or page containing several images. Take the mouse over to any image and right-click to open the image in a new tab.

This will open the image in a new browser tab, and you’ll be able to see that it has a .webp extension in the address bar.

If the plugin is unable to serve the webp image, then you can go back to the plugin’s settings page. From here you can change the WebP delivery option to ‘JS WebP Rewriting’ or ‘<picture> WebP Rewriting’ methods.

Method 2. Using WebP Images in WordPress with Imagify

Imagify is a WordPress image optimization plugin created by the folks behind WP Rocket, the best WordPress caching plugin. It allows you to easily optimize and convert images to WebP image format.

First thing you need to do is install and activate the Imagify plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to visit Settings » Imagify page to configure plugin settings. From here. click on the ‘Create a Free API Key’ button to continue.

You’ll be asked to enter an business email address after that you can check your inbox for an email containing your API key. Copy and paste the key on plugin’s settings page and click on the Save Changes button.

Next, you need to scroll down to the Optimization section. There you need to check the options next to ‘Create webp versions of images’ and ‘Display images in webp format on the site’ options.

Below that, you can choose from two delivery methods to display WebP images in WordPress. The first one is .htaccess method, and the second one is by using <picture> tag.

The .htaccess method is faster, but it does not work if you are using a CDN service. <picture> tag method works with CDNs too, but it may break some WordPress themes.

You can choose either one that works well for your site. After that, click on the ‘Save & go to bulk optimizer’ button at the bottom.

This will bring you to Media » Bulk Optimization page. The plugin will automatically start optimizing all your WordPress images in the background.

If you have a lot of images, then this may take a while. Don’t worry, you can close the page and come back to it later because closing the page will not stop the image optimization process.

Testing Your WebP Images in WordPress

Once the optimization is done, you can visit a page or post containing a few images. Take your mouse over to an image and then right-click to select ‘Open image in new tab’.

This will open the image in a new browser tab, and you’ll be able to see .webp extension in the address bar.

Method 3. Using WebP Images in WordPress with SG Optimizer

This method is recommended if you are a SiteGround user.

SiteGround is one of the best WordPress hosting companies. They offer a free SG Optimizer plugin to their users which allows you to optimize your WordPress performance. It also includes the option to optimize WordPress images.

First, you need to install and activate the SG Optimizer plugin.

Upon activation, the plugin will add a new menu item to your admin sidebar labeled ‘SG Optimizer’. Clicking on it will take you to the plugin’s settings page.

From here you can turn on the caching settings if you want to use SiteGround’s built in caching system.

After that, you can switch to the Media Optimization tab and turn on the ‘Generate WebP Copies of New Images’ option.

Below that, you’ll see the option to ‘Bulk Generate WebP Files’. Clicking on it will start generating WebP copies for all image files in your WordPress media library.

Once finished, your WordPress site will start serving WebP images.

Testing WebP Images in SG Optimizer

To see if your website is serving WebP images, you need to open a page on your site with a few images.

After that, right click and select Inspect tool. This will open the developer console where you need to switch to the Network tab.

From here, click on the ‘img’ tab and then reload the page (CTRL+R on Windows and Command+R on Mac). As your website reloads, you will see all the images loaded in the developer console.

We hope this article helped you learn how to use WebP images in WordPress. You may also want to see our guide on how to create an email newsletter, and our comparison of the best business phone services for your website.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

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