Google Reviews Widget for Website: Add and Embed Google Reviews on Your Site

This surprises people, so it is worth saying plainly: Google has no official embed for the reviews on your Business Profile. There is no snippet inside Google Business Profile that renders your reviews on your own site. That is why every "Google reviews widget" you find is a third party tool. Trustpilot works the other way around, bundling its TrustBox widget into the plan but allowancing how many you may run, which is the trade worth understanding before paying for either: we priced it out in Trustpilot vs Google reviews. What you are really choosing is which tool brings the reviews across, how fast it loads, and how much control you get over the way they look.

On WordPress specifically the choice is noisier, because the plugin repository has hundreds of them and the three largest have well over a million installations between them. The thing that separates them is not the layout gallery, it is which Google API each one calls, and that is what decides whether you can ever show more than five reviews. That comparison, with the verified free-tier caps and per-domain prices, is on the Google reviews WordPress plugin page.

A five star average tells a visitor you are legitimate. It does not tell them that a business like theirs got the specific result they want. That is the job of a testimonial, where a named customer describes the problem they had and what changed. The strongest pages carry both: the Google rating as a credibility signal, and a handful of video testimonials or detailed written quotes doing the actual persuading. If your proof is spread across Facebook, industry directories and your inbox as well as Google, a general review widget for your website pulls every source into one embed instead of showing only the Google slice. And if what you actually want is your own customer quotes rather than imported star ratings, that is a different embed: a testimonials widget for a website displays proof you collected yourself, at any length and with video, and it is not capped at five.

Review widgets are one of the most common causes of a slow landing page. Many load a large third party bundle, pull remote fonts, and shift your layout while they render, which shows up as poor Core Web Vitals and can cost you both rankings and conversions. Our embed is built to stay small and render without shifting the page, so adding proof does not cost you speed.

If you want to measure that rather than take our word for it, the metric these widgets actually break is layout shift rather than load time, and the testing method most guides recommend misses it. We wrote up how to check it properly in testimonial widgets and Core Web Vitals.

Display reviews as the customer wrote them. Do not edit a review to change its meaning, do not attach a name to words the person did not say, and do not present a review as a testimonial you commissioned. The FTC expects endorsements to reflect the honest opinions of real customers. Accurate attribution is also simply more persuasive: buyers can smell a polished, invented quote.

There is a second rule that only bites once you start choosing which reviews appear. The FTC Rule on Consumer Reviews and Testimonials at 16 CFR 465.7(b) covers suppressing reviews on the basis of their rating or negative sentiment and then presenting what is left as if it represented the whole. A widget showing five reviews you did not select is not making that claim. A hand-picked wall of five star reviews is closer to it. The grounds on which you may lawfully leave a review out, and how the five review cap interacts with all of this, are set out in can I use Google reviews on my website. The same question about the testimonials you collect yourself, where you do control the selection, is answered in can you show only positive testimonials on your website.

If you run several branches, resist blending their ratings into one average. A visitor on a location page wants that location, and an aggregate across every branch hides the one with a problem. How each widget vendor bills for that setup, and why domain-metered tools stay cheap while source-metered ones multiply, is on best review widget for multiple locations.

If you are looking for the HTML to drop Google reviews onto a page, it helps to know there are only three real routes and each one has a hard constraint.

1. The Places API. You can call Place Details, ask for the reviews field, and render the result yourself. This works for any business, including ones you do not own, but it returns a maximum of five reviews, and that cap is the reason most hand rolled widgets look thin. There is no parameter that raises it. You also need an API key, billing enabled on a Google Cloud project, and a caching layer, because calling the API on every page view is both slow and expensive.

2. The Google Business Profile API. This one gives full access to reviews, with pages of up to 50, but only for locations you actually manage and have been granted access to. That is the correct route for a multi location business that wants every review, and it needs OAuth rather than a simple key, which puts it firmly in developer territory rather than a paste in snippet.

3. A third party widget. Someone else handles the API, the caching, the layout and the refresh, and you paste one line. This is what most businesses should do, and the real questions become what it does to your page speed, whether the styling matches your site rather than announcing itself as a plugin, and what the vendor meters. Several widget companies bill on widget views rather than reviews, which means the embed can stop rendering once a busy month passes the cap. We took the most widely used of them apart, plan by plan, on our Elfsight alternative page. Others meter domains instead of views, which avoids that failure mode entirely but still leaves you displaying reviews that live on somebody else platform; that trade-off is worked through on our Trustindex alternative page.

One more constraint sits above all three routes, and it is the one that stops ecommerce sellers outright: Google grants a Business Profile only to a business with a physical location customers can visit or a service area it travels to, so an online-only store has no listing and therefore no reviews to render by any method. The Shopify version of that problem, including the free Merchant Center program merchants reach for instead, is on Google reviews Shopify app. On Squarespace the binding constraint is different again, because Squarespace only runs widget JavaScript on its Core plan and above: that is on Google reviews for Squarespace. On Wix the constraint is the placement route rather than the plan tier, because the drag in embed element is an iframe that Wix documents as not responsive: that is on Google reviews Wix. On Webflow the gate is broader still, because both ways of pasting a widget need a paid Workspace or an active Site plan, so a free Webflow site cannot run any of these vendors: that is on Google reviews Webflow.

A naming note, since it causes constant confusion in search: Google My Business was renamed Google Business Profile, so GMB reviews, Google Business Profile reviews and Google reviews all mean the same thing, and a "GMB reviews widget" is the same product as a Google reviews widget. Whichever route you take, remember the five review ceiling only applies to the Places API path, and that scraping the reviews out of Google Maps instead is against Google's terms. Our own embed handles the collection and display side in one line, and pairs those reviews with the deeper testimonials you gather yourself, which is covered on the review widget page and in how to get more Google reviews.