The success of every business is dependent on the word of mouth. This is mainly achieved with product reviews and customer testimonials. If a customer purchases anything from your website or blog, there is a high probability that they will leave a review about the product. These reviews and testimonials are useful to other customers and users visiting your site for the first time. They will have a good impression of the services and products you deliver to your clients. Clients may also leave recommendations which might be useful in the growth of the business.
To display product reviews and customers’ testimonials on a WordPress website, you require a reliable plugin. A plugin that is easy to understand, use and affordable. One such a plugin is Testimonials Ultimate by wpicode.com. With this plugin, you can display product reviews and testimonials in any desired layout on your website. You can display testimonials from
your clients in a sidebar through the Testimonials Ultimate widget or you can display them in a page or post through the short-code.
You can get this plugin from the wpicode.com website. Download the plugin and install it on your WordPress website. This plugin has been highly optimized and runs on WordPress version 2.0.2 or any higher WordPress installation. After installation, you should be able to see the Testimonial menu on the WordPress dashboard.
To create your first testimonial, click on the Testimonial menu on the dashboard. You should be able to see other four sub-menus pop up below it, namely, Testimonials, Add New Testimonial, Extra Shortcodes and Settings. For first-time users click on the Add New Testimonial menu. On the main window, you will see the Testimonials Ultimate window from which you will create your testimonials.
There are several fields that you will be required to fill. One is the Title of your testimonial. This title will be displayed on the website. You can also include a subtitle. In the Testimonial text box, you will be required to write the customers’ testimonial or product review. You can also upload the customers image or use a link to the image location. Fill the order number which can be anything from 1 – 10. There are several other fields which you can fill depending on the testimonial you wish to embed. You can even add a star rating. After you are done setting up everything, click on the insert testimonial button.
You will be directed to the testimonials page where you will be able to see the testimonials you have created. Here, you can edit or delete the testimonial.
Now you need to embed the testimonial on your website or blog. Just below the listed testimonials, you will see the shortcode generator which generates shortcodes that you can embed in your web pages and posts.
To generate your first shortcode, you will be required to fill in several fields.
- Category
- Layout (The layout in which the testimonials will be displayed i.e Accordion, simple etc. You basically have 9 layouts or 8 if you don’t count the widget view layout)
- Theme color
and several more additional fields. The shortcode will be generated automatically. Copy the shortcode and embed it in your post or web page to display the testimonial in your website. Depending on the layout and theme you chose, you should see something like this,
With Version 3.0 of Testimonials Ultimate, there are new shortcodes added to this plugin. These shortcodes can be found in the Extra Shortcodes sub-menu in the Testimonials menu item. We have the progress bar that displays 3 progress bar on your site. You can change the percentage and color values as you wish.
The other extra shortcode is the pricing shortcode for emebedding a price table on your website. This directs your client to purchase your products directly from your website.
