Hello friends,

Do you want to increase your brand awareness and conversions rates and attract more customers to your WordPress website? I am sure that you do! So in today’s post I will be talking about testimonials – why are they needed as a social proofing tool and how can they help you. I will also make a review of one easy to use WordPress plugin that is created for this purpose.

So let’s see how you can add testimonials to your WordPress website with Easy Testimonials.

First things – first! Why testimonials are important and why should you have them on your website?

Testimonials are know to beat any other type of content marketing in terms of effectiveness. The reason for this is simple. Nowadays the Internet is huge and you can purchase goods and services from a vast amount of websites. However some of them are made just to scam the customers and to take their money by providing inadequate services or low-quality goods. The good news is that most websites are not aiming at this! Their owners understand that profitable business is based on the foundations of trust. That is why they want to provide their customers with the best quality of both goods and services.

But how to convince customers that your website is one of the “good guys” and what you are aiming to sell is with the best quality and optimal price? By doing some marketing and PR. And to be more specific – you’d want to pay special attention to content marketing by providing your customers with reviews, blog posts, etc. And of course you’d want to display testimonials from happy customers that have already made purchases and were more than satisfied.

These testimonials will be telling your new customers a couple of things. First – this website is genuine and I will not get scammed here. Second – I will know exactly what to search for and what to purchase from this website.

Of course the latter usage of testimonials is related to websites that aim to sell goods from different manufacturers.

In most cases you’d want to display testimonials for the first reason – so that your new customers can be attracted.

Let’s not forget that testimonials are a sure way of increasing conversions rates on your website, when used correctly and effectively!

How to add testimonials on WordPress with Easy Testimonials?

Download and install the plugin. Then activate it and head to the new menu called Testimonials in your WordPress admin panel. From there you can see your already created testimonials, add new ones and manage their categories.

Each testimonial can be created by using the WordPress visual or text editors. You can add the content and format it according to your needs. After this you can add some information about the customer who has given this testimonial. You will be able to add:

• Client name
• E-mail address
• Position/Location/Other
• Location/Product Reviewed/Other
• Rating

Each testimonial can have a specific category or categories. Adding them is similar to adding categories to your WordPress posts. You can choose from the existing ones or add a new one. You can also add a featured image for the testimonial. When you are done editing/creating it you can use the generated shortcode in order to display it on a specific post or page on your WordPress website.

Create/Edit a testimonial

If you want to edit the plugin’s settings you have to go to another newly created menu in the WordPress admin panel. It will be called Easy Testimonials Settings. It contains several sub-menus:

• Options – here you can adjust the way Easy Testimonials work. You can set basic options, display options and theme options. You can also adjust settings for a submission form for your testimonials;
• Shortcode Generator – here you can generate a new shortcode for your testimonials;
• Import & Export Testimonials
• Help & Instructions

The plugin also provides a widget for displaying random testimonials. It can be added to any of your WordPress widget areas and you can configure its behavior as well.

Another widget is also available. It is called Testimonial Cycle Widget and it can display testimonials in a slideshow.

There is also a Testimonial List Widget that will display testimonials as lists.

If you want to display only a single testimonial – there is also a widget for this. And another one if you want to display testimonials in a grid.

Easy Testimonials is a free plugin. However it also has a professional version that unlocks all of its capabilities. For example the submission form for your customers and users. They will be able to write the content by themselves and also upload images with testimonials. This form can be integrated with captcha plugins so that you can be protected from spam. The PRO version also provides you with many other benefits as well. Make sure that you check them out in the WordPress.org page of the plugin.

Easy Testimonials is also SEO friendly. The plugin uses uses schema.org compliant JSON-LD markup, so that your testimonials appear correctly in search results. Let’s not forget that the testimonial content is also adding additional text and images for indexation purposes as well.

So what do you think, friends? Will you use Easy Testimonials on your WordPress website? Share any thoughts and questions in the comment section below.

See you soon, friends!

*The images are embedded from the WordPress.org page of the plugin.