How to Add Your Google Reviews to Your Website
You’ve done the hard part. You’ve asked politely, made it easy, and the reviews have started stacking up on your Google Business Profile. Lovely. Now here’s the bit most small businesses never get round to: those reviews are sitting on Google, working hard for people who find you on the map — and doing absolutely nothing for the people who land on your website.
That’s a shame, because your website is where the deciding happens. Someone’s read your services, glanced at the prices, and is hovering over the “get a quote” button wondering whether you’re any good. A row of real reviews at that exact moment is worth more than another paragraph of you telling them how great you are.
Why reviews belong on the website too
There’s a simple rule in selling: the more nervous someone is, the more they want to hear from somebody who isn’t you. Every word on your website is yours, written by you, in your favour. A review is the one bit of the page a customer actually believes.
Reviews on your own site also reach people who arrived from somewhere else entirely — a Facebook post, a van sticker, a friend’s recommendation, a search that never touched the map pack. They sit next to the thing you want people to do, rather than three taps away. And they let you show the right review in the right place: the one about your emergency call-out belongs on your emergency call-out page.
If you’re still in the earlier stage of this — getting the reviews in the first place — start with our guide on how to get more Google reviews, then come back to this.
Don’t bury them on a “testimonials” page
The most common mistake is building a page called Testimonials, filling it with lovely quotes and linking to it from the footer. Almost nobody clicks it. A page that exists purely to say “look how good we are” is transparently self-serving, and visitors treat it accordingly.
Reviews work far better scattered through the pages people actually read:
- Two or three on the homepage, high enough that they’re seen without much scrolling.
- One on each service page, chosen because it mentions that service.
- One right beside the contact form or phone number — the last thing they read before deciding.
- Your star rating and review count in the header or footer, quietly, everywhere.
It’s the same reviews. It’s just the difference between putting them where people are and hoping people come to them.
The three ways to do it
There are only really three options, and they trade off against each other.
| Option | Stays up to date | Speed cost | Effort |
|---|---|---|---|
| Live widget | Yes, automatically | Adds third-party scripts — slows the page | Paste code once |
| Quoted by hand | No — you update it | None | Ten minutes, now and again |
| Screenshot image | No — goes stale | Minor (one image) | Quickest to do |
Live Google reviews widget
A widget is a small block of code from a third-party service that pulls your reviews straight from Google and displays them on your page, updating itself as new ones come in. Plenty of these exist, free and paid.
The upside is obvious: set it up once and it never goes stale. The downside is worth taking seriously. A widget loads someone else’s JavaScript onto your website — extra requests, a slower page, and a dependency on a company you have no relationship with. If they change their pricing, break something or disappear, your review section goes with them. Free tiers also tend to arrive with the provider’s own branding attached.
If you go this route, load the page on your phone afterwards and see what it does — a review block that takes four seconds to appear has cost you more than it earned. Speed matters for the same reasons we cover in local SEO for small businesses.
Quoting reviews by hand
Copy the review text, the reviewer’s name as it appears on Google, and the star rating, and lay them out as ordinary text on your page. This is the option we’d nudge most small businesses towards.
It’s instant to load, it looks exactly how you want it to, nothing can break it, and you can pick the review that fits each page. The cost is that it doesn’t update itself — you have to remember to swap in fresher ones. Put it on a calendar: once a quarter, spend ten minutes replacing the oldest quotes with the newest. That’s the whole maintenance burden.
A screenshot of your reviews
The quick-and-dirty option: screenshot your Google reviews and drop the image in. It looks unmistakably real, which is a genuine advantage. But it goes out of date silently, the text inside an image can’t be read by search engines, and it’s often unreadable on a phone. If you use one, keep it small, add a caption in real text, and replace it whenever your rating changes.
The rules — please don’t break these
Reviews are somebody else’s words about your business, and there are lines you shouldn’t cross.
Don’t edit the wording. Not to fix a typo, not to trim a bit that’s less flattering. If a review is too long, use a shorter extract and make it clear that’s what it is with an ellipsis — but never change what someone said.
Don’t cherry-pick to the point of dishonesty. Showing your best reviews is fair — everyone does it. Showing five glowing ones while your actual profile sits well below that is not; anyone who checks will feel misled, and they will check. If your rating is middling, the fix is more good work and more reviews, not better editing.
Don’t write them yourself. Fabricated reviews are, quite apart from being dishonest, easy to spot. They read like marketing because they are.
Attribute properly. Name (as it appears publicly on Google), star rating, and ideally the date. An anonymous “Great service! – A customer” is worth nothing.
About those star ratings in Google results
You may have seen websites showing gold stars in the search results. That comes from review schema — structured data in the page code that tells Google there are reviews here.
Two warnings. The stars must reflect genuine reviews that are actually visible on the page; marking up invented ratings breaches Google’s spam policies and can get your site penalised. And Google is deliberately restrictive about star ratings for a business reviewing itself — self-serving markup for your own organisation generally won’t earn stars in search anyway. Your Google Business Profile is where your rating shows up, and that’s fine. Put reviews on your site because they convince humans, not because you’re chasing stars.
Nowhere to put them?
All of this assumes you’ve got a website to put the reviews on. If your Google Business Profile is doing all the work alone, we’ve written about where that falls short — and it’s worth knowing what else belongs on a small business site alongside the reviews.
Here’s where we declare our interest: building those sites is our business. Our team designs and builds your website from your Google Business Profile — your services, photos, hours and reviews already in place — free, on a free .co.uk domain, live within 48 hours of the domain being registered, with hosting at £24 a month (including VAT) as the only cost. If your reviews have nowhere to work, claim your free website.
The short version
Get the reviews onto the pages people actually read, next to the buttons you want them to press. Quote them by hand if you want a fast, sturdy page; use a widget if you’d rather never think about it again and can live with the loading time. Never edit the words, never fake them, always say who wrote them. Reviews are the most persuasive thing on your website, and you didn’t even have to write them.