Customer testimonials on a website build credibility, make it easier for people to make buying decisions and give your brand a positive professional identity – it is valid social proof that users today look for, depend on and trust.
Whether you have an ecommerce website or offer services, your existing customers can help you build your brand and do more business by leaving testimonials. Customer testimonials on a website highlight the experience of doing business with you, how your customers have benefitted from it, your strong suits and much more. New and potential customers get a fair idea of what they can expect when they do business with you.
Once you build your WordPress website and power it with WordPress Hosting or WooCommerce Hosting, depending on your needs – you can go ahead and start giving your website a well-branded look and experience. You add all the functionality you and your customers need, and as you start doing business you will soon have a pool of customers who are willing to give their testimony to doing business with you.
WordPress plugins are excellent to add all kinds of functionality to your website and yes, WordPress testimonials plugins exist too! Our Complete WordPress Guide can help you understand all about plugins, and much more to get the most from WordPress.
Before we jump in and look at how you can add customer testimonials on your WordPress website, let’s look at why you should do this.
Why should you add customer testimonials to your WordPress website?
When it comes to content marketing, statistics show that customer testimonials have the highest rate of effectiveness.
Customer Testimonials on a website are social proof that advocates a business’s service, product and/or experience. Just like online ratings/scorings and likes and followers count on social media platforms, users today look for customer testimonials on a website to validate the credibility and authority of a business.
Also, simply, the fact that you have a bunch of happy customers willing to share their experience of doing business with you is great for your credibility!
However, it takes time to collect a decent number of testimonials and you’ll want at least 4-5 testimonials before you go ahead and add them to your website. Here are some key things to note:
- As much as you want to be honest, focus on positive sentiments shared by customers and handle negative statistics through a different customer support channel
- Add pictures of customers, with permission, to give it a more credible look and feel
- If there are influencers, thought leaders or known people advocating your products/services, do include that
- Try and build stories rather than keeping them flat and dry
How do you collect customer testimonials for your website?
Email lists, social media platforms, after-sales communications – are all great ways to collect testimonials. The important thing is to create a form/questionnaire that makes it easier for people to share testimonials.
You could add specific questions like:
- What benefit did you get from our product/service?
- What’s your favourite feature?
- Would you recommend this product/service to others? Why?
- Rate our customer support on a scale of 1-5, 1 being poor and 5 being excellent
- Is there anything you’d like to add about your experience of doing business with us
You get the gist, right? Collect the information, take permission to share on your website, ask for pictures or videos of product use – anything and everything that convinces others to do business with you.
Now we come to the final step – adding these testimonials to your WordPress website.
3-Step Process to Add Customer Testimonials to Your WordPress Website
Yes, there are just 3 steps to adding customer testimonials to your website. Let’s begin.
STEP 1 – Install & Activate Testimonial Plugin
The first step is choosing and installing a WordPress testimonials plugin. Just go to the WordPress.org Plugin Directory and search for ‘Testimonials’ and a wide range of options will show up. Strong Testimonials is a popular and highly recommended plugin, but go ahead and pick one that best fits your needs.
Once you have selected the Testimonials Plugin you want to use, install and activate it.
STEP 2 – Set up Plugin & Add Testimonial
Once you have installed and activated your plugin. Log in to your WordPress dashboard go to Testimonials > Add New
Now add a Title for the testimonial, the customer’s testimonial and information (name, business name, etc.), and under ‘Featured Image’ add their picture.
Save and click on Publish
Repeat the steps above to add each testimonial.
STEP 3 – Style Your Testimonials
Now we’re going to set up a style for how the testimonials appear on our WordPress website.
Go to Testimonials > Views > Add New
Give your testimonial style a name. Then scroll down to Layout and select the style name you chose. Here you can set up the number of columns you’d like to display.
You can check other sections like Custom Fields, Featured Image, etc. Once done Save Changes
Copy the Shortcode that will appear on the top of the page
Go to Pages > Add New
Add Title Name as Testimonials and paste the shortcode in the text box that appears. Click Publish
You should now be able to see the testimonial you just added! Repeat the steps to add more testimonials.
If you want to change the layout, background colours, fonts or anything else about the style, you can always go back to Testimonials > Views and make changes.
1-2-3 DONE!
Ready to Build Credibility with Customer Testimonials on your WordPress Website?
In just 3 easy steps you can add customer testimonials to your WordPress website and let new and potential customers know you are credible, you are great at what you do, you have happy customers who vouch for you, and you are ready to wow more and more customers!
Start collecting testimonials and once you have a bunch of them ready start uploading!
For more tips and information, read more on our WordPress Tutorials category.
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