Customer Testimonials: How to Get Them and Where to Put Them
A stranger landing on your website has one worry above all others: are these people any good? You can tell them you are, and they’ll take it with a pinch of salt. Or somebody who has actually paid you can tell them, in their own words, and that lands very differently. That’s all a customer testimonial is, and it’s one of the few things on a small business website that costs nothing and does real work.
The trouble is that most testimonials are wasted. They’re vague (“great service, would recommend”), anonymous (“J.S., satisfied customer”), and quarantined on a page nobody visits. Here’s how to get ones that are worth having, and where to put them so they’re actually read.
A testimonial is not a Google review
A Google review is public, written on Google’s terms, and you don’t control it. You can’t edit it, and it shows up next to your business in Maps and search whether you like it or not. That’s exactly what makes reviews valuable: they help you get found, and readers trust them because they know you couldn’t have tidied them up. Getting more of them is a separate subject, covered in our guide to getting more Google reviews.
A testimonial is what you choose to put on your own website. You decide which ones to use, where they go, and how they’re presented. That control is the point — it lets you put the right words next to the right service — but it’s also why a testimonial on its own is trusted a little less than a review. A reader knows you picked it.
The two work best together. And if a customer has already left you a good Google review, you can use it as a testimonial — quoted, credited and unchanged — which is often the easiest source of all.
How to ask without cringing
Most people find asking awkward, so they don’t, and the site stays empty. Three things help.
Ask at the moment the job is finished and the customer is pleased. Not a week later by email, when the glow has faded and it’s become a chore. The moment they say “that’s brilliant, thank you” is the moment to say “would you mind if I quoted you on the website?” Almost everyone says yes.
Ask for two specific things, not “any feedback”. A blank request produces a blank answer — “great service”. Instead ask: what was the problem you had, and what was it like dealing with us? Those two questions produce a testimonial with a before and an after, which is what a future customer is looking for. “The boiler had packed up on the coldest week of the year, and they were out the same afternoon” is a story. “Very professional” is not.
Offer to write nothing on their behalf. It’s tempting to say “just tell me roughly and I’ll put it into words”. Don’t. Their words, with the odd clumsy phrase, are what make it sound like a person rather than a brochure. If they’d rather say it out loud while you’re packing up, note it down as they said it and send it to them to check. Drafting it for them to sign off is not the same thing, and it reads that way.
The honesty rules
Never write a testimonial for a customer, never invent one, and never buy one. Fake reviews are now a specific matter for the Competition and Markets Authority under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, and the CMA can act directly against businesses that publish them or commission them. Whatever the legal position, it doesn’t work anyway: made-up praise reads as made-up, and readers can tell the difference between a real customer’s odd, specific phrasing and a paragraph of tidy marketing.
Don’t polish them. Fixing a typo is fine. Rewriting a sentence to sound better is not — you’ll sand off exactly the roughness that makes it convincing. If it’s too long, cut it with their permission and mark the cut with ”…”.
What makes one believable
Attribution does more work than the words. Compare:
“Excellent work, very happy.” — J., satisfied customer
“They replaced the whole fuse board in a morning and left the place cleaner than they found it.” — Sarah, Ashford, consumer unit replacement
The second is believable because it’s specific in three ways: a first name, a place, and what the job actually was. A reader in Ashford with a dodgy fuse board now knows you’ve done that job, nearby, for someone who’d say so.
| Weak | Better |
|---|---|
| ”Great service” | What the problem was, and what happened |
| ”J.S.” or “A customer” | First name and town |
| Stock headshot | A photo of the finished job |
| No date | The year, or “last winter” |
| Perfect prose | Their own words, clumsy bits included |
A photo of the finished work beats a stock headshot every time. Nobody believes a smiling stock model was your customer. A photo of the actual patio, kitchen or rewired garage, with the testimonial beside it, is proof and praise in one.
Ask permission before publishing a name and a town. Most people are happy with a first name and a place; some would rather not, and “a customer in Folkestone” is still a great deal better than nothing. If someone later asks you to take it down, take it down, the same day, without arguing. Their words are theirs.
Where to put them
Here’s the mistake almost every small business website makes: a “Testimonials” page, tucked in the navigation, with every quote on it. Nobody goes there. People read the page about the service they need, decide, and leave.
So scatter them. Put the testimonial about the bathroom on the bathroom page. Put the one about the emergency call-out next to the emergency call-out section. A quote sitting beside the thing it’s praising is read by exactly the person it will persuade, at the moment they’re deciding.
Then put two or three of your best on the homepage, near the top, where a first-time visitor sees them without scrolling. That’s the order of priority: service pages first, homepage second, and a dedicated page — if you want one at all — a distant third, for the overflow.
If you’d rather pull your live Google reviews onto the site instead of, or as well as, hand-picked testimonials, our guide to adding Google reviews to your website covers the three ways to do it and the rules that come with each. And if you do collect a bad one along the way, here’s how to handle a negative Google review without making it worse.
The short version
Ask when the customer is pleased, ask two specific questions, and write nothing for them. Credit with a first name, a town and the job, in their words. Never invent, never buy. Put each testimonial next to the service it’s about, and a few on the homepage — not on a page nobody clicks. Get permission, and honour a request to remove.
Testimonials are one of the things a small business website should carry, and the easiest to get: your happy customers already exist, and most would gladly say so if asked.
Here’s where we declare our interest: if you haven’t got a website to put them on yet, we build one from your Google Business Profile — your services, hours, photos and reviews — 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. Claim your free website and you’ll have somewhere to put those quotes by the end of the week.