If you have a business and a Trustpilot page which hasn’t changed for months and you have a good product you’re not out-sold on quality. You are getting out out-sold on proof. If a shopper is comparing two offers that are virtually identical, with forty reviews from a couple of weeks ago vs. six reviews from two years ago, he will choose the former over the latter, each and every time, no matter which product is the superior item. That’s a gap that can be filled. It’s not something that you get done with just installing a widget, it’s a process and then patience with the process until the numbers move.
Why a Thin Review Profile Reads as a Red Flag
Having a few old and outdated Trustpilot reviews is not as neutral to a visitor. It would seem that very few people have been around long enough to write one, or that the business hasn’t asked. Both readings have a negative impact upon conversion, and neither has anything to do with the quality of your product.
This is no makeover. To put a 5-star badge on a homepage, on which no real reviews are produced, is even worse than not to have a badge on that homepage, because this badge is now the clickable object that is poked by a critical visitor. You click through, check out the 3 reviews from 2023 and you’ve lost more trust than you gained from the badge. Getting this right involves taking the “review profile” from a “one and done” screen shot to an asset with inputs, maintenance, and a responsible person.
There’s a first order effect – and a second order effect, which is just as important as the first order effect. There is a relationship between search visibility and reviews volume. So a healthy, up-to-date review count in the Trustpilot profile combined with the linked schema block AggregateRating can result in measurable changes in click-through rate by displaying star ratings on the listing already, before the potential customer reaches your website. Having a thin profile or no profile at all doesn’t only not help here, it means that this click-through advantage is with whoever took the trouble to set up a profile. Reputation – that is, not just a conversion lever when someone arrives on your page. Partially it’s a distribution lever even before they arrive. Many business consider better to buy trustpilot reviews that is totally your choice.
What Changed When I Actually Did This on My Own Site
I did exactly the same thing on bloggertemplate.org (the site from which BTO Themes are made). Before I got a real presence on Trustpilot there was no third party signal to check out other than my statements on product pages that the templates were great, and a skeptical buyer automatically discounts these types of statements. All the template descriptions of the different theme marketplaces state the same thing: Fast, clean, SEO ready, etc. etc. etc. and a visitor doesn’t have any way to differentiate mine from the dozen or so tabs they likely have open. Until real reviews were posted and connected from the site, that was the case. Sales doubled, and it was not like this was a fluke – I think the visitors read reviews before they buy, and Trustpilot in particular is respected because they know that it’s an independent entity, and they would have no interest in singling me out, unless there was something wrong with me. That’s all the workings – and not a trick, just taking the load off my shoulders.
If anyone was trying to do what we did, I think I would say this: It wasn’t an overnight change and it wasn’t just the widget. There was the widget, which sat atop a growing number of reviews, week after week, due to my persistent asking. But the static badge doesn’t have this effect, just 11 reviews for three months in a row doesn’t do the persuading, it’s that they’re still active purchasing, and they still bother to write a review after that, that does the persuading.
Criteria Analysis: What Actually Separates the Review-Widget Options
Before you even start to use one of the HTML editors that people use with themes, it’s worthwhile to put into perspective the few tools that people go for for comparison, based on attributes that are verifiable, not on some sort of reputation. Everything up to “which one has more reviews of itself,” is comparison information, but you really do not find out how it performs when it is actually placed on a live page competing with your images, your ad units and your analytics script.
Criteria 1 — . Trustpilot’s TrustBox widgets are added as an asynchronously loaded (a JavaScript snippet with the ‘async’ attribute is used by default in the code that Trustpilot’s dashboard generates) so it will not block the painting of the rest of the page. There are still some competitors (a few white-label review plugins done for WordPress) which default to a synchronous <script> tag or some iframe with no lazy attribute, and this will be in your critical rendering path until it completes. If the embed code doesn’t contain either of the attributes, then it is assumed that they will be added, and not all platforms’ terms of service will permit changing the snippet.
Criteria 2 — Free-tier ceiling. The free plan is entitled to the widgets of the TrustBox and unlimited free organic reviews, however automated invitation emails sent via their system can only be used after paying for the Business plan, and the same applies to bulk CSV export – it’s not available for free. In contrast, Feefo does not offer much of a free version – you end up talking to sales before you’re granted access to anything. If your plan relies on free automated invitations, then verify this prior to creating a workflow on it, as you will be manually inviting individuals with the free plan.
Criteria 3 — Schema mark up support. This is the one thing people forget and don’t understand why their star ratings are not appearing in Google search results. Whilst Trustpilot do add their own structured data to their own site, this does not add a Trustpilot rich snippet of AggregateRating data to your site, but rather you need to add your own JSON-LD block to your site that references your Trustpilot profile URL, or install a plugin that does it for you. Some competitor tools will do this natively as part of the embed, others do not even mention it in their documentation, which typically means that they don’t.
Criteria 4 — The path for inviting automation. Trustpilot’s Automated Feedback Service can be triggered by a transactional event from API, Zapier or some of the few integrations available for ecommerce. If you are using Blogger as your site instead of Shopify or WooCommerce, you will not have the integration (unless you use the API), you will only receive the emails of your customers after each customer order or enquiry as a manual CSV file. This manual process is okay in low volume situations, but is the real hindrance once you reach a couple dozen transactions per week.
Criteria 5 — Customization depth. No, TrustBox widgets provide the option to set the locale, star color, and have a variety of fixed layouts (mini, micro, carousel and grid), but you are playing in their template, so you cannot rearrange the internal layout like you would be able to with a fully custom-coded testimonial block. If your theme has a definite visual style, preview the widget in both light and dark modes (if your theme has one), before you commit as few of the fixed color schemes will look bad on a dark background.
Criteria 6 — Verified-purchase tagging. Trustpilot differentiates between an ‘Invited’ review and one that is left on a public Company page that any user can make. That difference is reflected in the widget if it is turned on and more important than the overall rating to a past victim of a potentially bogus array of 5-star ratings. Other sites don’t differentiate between the two, and so it’s impossible to prove that a review is from a real customer, even if it is.
None of these are on their own egregious, but they are all important. These are the things a savvy buyer would look for before equating “reviews widget” with all of the tools that provide a widget.
A 5-star rating with only three reviews from eighteen months ago won’t garner trust; it will instead let the visitor know that not many people have had a reason to review the site, and he is more likely to see that than the stars.
Building the Organic Review-Request Habit
The single most leveraging thing you can do, doesn’t cost anything and is not at all a tool: ask, at the time satisfaction is highest, not weeks later. This is typically when a user has just downloaded, set up or received a reply to a support ticket, rather than in a generic monthly newsletter blast that has no particular experience associated with it.
A successful cadence would be to send a review request within 48 hours of the event that triggers it, to keep the ask brief and to one sentence (you can get links to drive customers to your review collection page on Trustpilot, either on a per customer basis or as a generic business link), and not to follow up on non-responders beyond a single attempt. A second reminder after a week is OK, a third is looking like pressure and sometimes yields a review – but the wrong kind.
Answer the responses including negative responses. A “public” answer to a three-star rating does more for a skeptical reader than a third five-star rating does, as it shows that a real person is behind the business, and he or she has read what has been written about the business.
Choose a couple of trigger points and only use those and not every possible opportunity. The obvious ones for a template shop are: right after a completed download or purchase confirmation e-mail, 1 week after a support ticket is closed with a positive resolution and (separate) a follow-up to those who give a private low (signal) through a post purchase e-mail survey, asking what would have to change before they recommend it publicly. That last one is NOT about suppression of negative feedback, it’s about the fact that there is an underlying issue that needs to be addressed before it becomes public, and is a legitimate use of a feedback loop and totally different from who is asked to post publicly.
What a Managed Review Campaign Actually Buys — and Where It Goes Wrong
The above manual cadence is easily described and can not be maintained beyond the initial weeks, hence managed services are in existence. A legitimate managed campaign is simply that cadence performed for you, with enhanced tooling: cadence is templated and personalized for the time it’s sent, deliverability is monitored to prevent the sending request from being caught in spam filters, and a report of response rate by channel.
It can’t, however, legitimately purchase reviews from those who have never interacted with the product: that’s the difference between “managed campaign” and “reputation fraud” – and that’s what is clearly prohibited in the terms and conditions of Trustpilot, leading to account suspension. Prior to paying anyone for this, find out how they perform on accounts of comparable size as yours and specifically ask if all the reviewers they receive were legit transactions. If the answer is ‘kind of’ then ‘kind of’ is the answer.
There are a couple of concrete questions that will help you tell the difference between a managed service provider whose intention is truly to build you an invitation email that’s branded to you vs. a managed service provider that is essentially selling you space for a fake invitation email: Can they send you a sample invitation email branded to you before you sign anything? Are they sent from your transactional email system from your domain or from a shared sending address which Trustpilot’s spam filter is more likely to be able to identify as spam? Does their price relate to the number of invitations sent out, or the number of reviews written — the latter is an incentive to ‘make a number’ by any means possible, and it’s important to note that this is not necessarily underhand. But does their contract outline what you need to do with your account if Trustpilot’s own fraud detection identifies a series of reviews – if the agency decides to take its own life when that occurs, you will still be liable for the account penalty.
Deployment Directive: Getting a Review Widget Live on a BTO Theme Without Breaking It
It’s the order to follow to really send out a TrustBox gadget to a Blogger template without tanking the web page speed or battling the template structure.
- Copy the TrustBox widget code (for the desired format, Mini, MicroStar or Carousel) from your Trustpilot Business dashboard or copy the entire snippet of code including the
asyncscript tag. - In Blogger, go to Theme, Edit HTML and paste this script tag one time — and only just before the tag — not in the body — you will otherwise load it twice, for example in a gadget you add per page.
- Place an HTML/JavaScript gadget in the layout area that you wish to have the badge displayed. If you’re working on a template with a footer that has a 3 column footer grid, add it into one footer column instead of across the whole width of the footer, to prevent the math for the footer grid from being skewed.
- If your theme uses lazy loading for images, but not ones in the post body (Quick Spot does lazy loading by default for images in the post body), then you need to make sure the widget’s images aren’t being targeted by the same lazy loading script and thus being broken in the top of the posts. Try in an incognito window as this may be because of cached assets.
- Go ahead and run the page through PageSpeed Insights on mobile – before and after adding the widget. When the Total Blocking Time starts to get noticeable, add the defer attribute to the script tag or better yet – don’t load the widget at all until it becomes visible in the viewport (via Intersection Observer).
- Place a manual block of JSON-LD code containing an AggregateRating type, link to your actual Trustpilot business profile URL and your real-life number of reviews and score – do not use numbers that will get out of sync in a month’s time.
- Let’s check the mobile break point of the widget. On Mag Soft, with its single-column stack under the magic number of 480px, check the widget collapses without overflowing its container (Carousel is more likely to do this, than Mini).
- If you’re running Adsense make sure there is some space either above or below the widget and the closest ad unit that can be visually mistaken for or accidentally clicked on – Google’s placement policies discourage content that could be mistaken for or accidentally clicked on an ads unit and a review carousel sitting flush against an ads unit is an invitation to that.
- After republishing, check the page prior to considering the task complete using Google’s Rich Results Test to ensure the stars still display — otherwise, the AggregateRating markup will not be valid, and stars will not appear in search results (although Blogger will not warn you of the error).
Measuring Whether Any of This Is Actually Working
Having a widget and coming back in 6 months is not measurement… it’s hoping. There are four numbers which can be monitored on a regular basis, which don’t need anything other than Trustpilot’s dashboard and your site’s built-in analytics tools.
Review velocity: the number of new reviews not total number per month. This month’s profile of 43 reviews compared to 40 last month is decelerating, and not the overall score, but the number of reviews.
Invitation response rate: the percentage of people that you invited who left a review. If it’s under about 5-10%, it’s not the product’s fault, it’s a timing or a wording issue of the ask – customers who are asked at the right time and right words are much more likely to convert to customers who are asked and not happy, into reviewers at more than 5-10% rates.
If you can do a split-test on your pages with the widget vs without the widget, even a before/after comparison on the same page, from your analytics over the timeframe when you installed the widget, will give you a good idea if it does or does not do anything versus just sitting there.
Rich-snippet appearance in search results: do some periodic checks for your brand name to look if the star rating is really next to your brand. After a theme update, schema can just cease to validate – and this is the best way to know it before it becomes costing you weeks of the click-through you’ve worked so hard to get.
Reading the Trust Signal Correctly Once It’s Live
Technical attributes of a widget’s installation does not constitute doing the job. The three items to periodically check: review recency (a profile with the newest review being 6 months old isn’t as good as no widget at all); check the star colour against the colour scheme of your theme (if your theme is generally cool blue, then a widget in Trustpilot’s default green will look like an add-on rather than integrated); check the schema markup after any theme change, as an update to the theme can silently remove the manually inserted script block.
None of this supersedes the basic issue that the reviews must be genuine and that the product must be worthy of these reviews. If you have the perfect implementation of a widget, and it is on top of a product that nobody is going to go out of their way and recommend, you’re getting found out faster, with better SEO.
Think of the review profile as you would of page speed or mobile layout—it isn’t something that you do, it’s something that you keep. It’s those businesses still seeking for reviews one year later, who do not have the “badges” installed on their sites and then forget about it, who retain the trust of their visitors.
If you are going to select a template to work from instead of working on an existing template, then you must take the layout into consideration. If you want to promote two or three particular reviews, rather than using the overall rating to sell them, then a grid-based magazine template like Grid Mag provides natural “card slots” above the fold to display a few pulled quote reviews in addition to the widget. If you prefer to have the review widget to be as simple as possible, and in a sidebar, and then allow the content of the product to have the majority of the page, then a template with one column like Nest Spot is the better choice, as the badge is the separator here and not the main draw of the page. There is no right or wrong answer to this, just as with the choices of specific quoted testimonials or just the fact that it’s displayed as a current rating with a continually rising number.
In any case, it takes an afternoon to do the technical work mentioned above (async script, schema block, mobile breakpoint check). It takes a lot longer to build a true review-generation habit to keep that widget honest, and it’s the aspect that virtually everyone neglects.
