Google Reviews on the site for WooCommerce

Google Reviews on the site is a plugin for WordPress and WooCommerce that shows your business’s Google rating and reviews on your own pages — as a block, as a shortcode, or automatically on the product page and the thank-you page. The plugin finds the business for you, by name or by a Google Maps link, so nobody has to hunt for a Place ID.

Reviews on Google are what a buyer reads before ordering, and they are exactly what the shop’s own site usually does not show. The plugin brings them onto the site the way Google’s policy requires: with the author’s name and avatar, with a link to the review on Google Maps, and with the Google Maps attribution next to the block.

A Google API key is required, and it is yours

Let us say this before you buy: the plugin works only with a Google API key that has “Places API (New)” enabled. You create that key in your own Google Cloud project, on your own billing account. We do not hand out keys, we do not proxy the traffic through us, and we never see your data — the request goes from your site straight to Google.

Without a key you cannot add a business at all: only Google can turn a name or a Maps link into a Place ID. Reviews typed in by hand are an addition to what Google returns for a business you have already added — not a way to run the plugin with no key. If you remove the key later, the widget keeps showing the stored cache and the manual reviews, but a new business can no longer be added.

The second thing worth knowing up front: Google returns at most five reviews per business. That is a limit of the Places API, not of the plugin — no plugin using the official API can show the sixth one. The only way past it is reviews you add by hand.

What the customer sees

At the top, the rating line: the average, the stars (halves included), the number of ratings, and a “Write a review” button that opens the review form of your business on Google. Below it, the review cards: author, avatar, rating, date, text. A long review is folded to “Read more”, but the full text stays in the page HTML — nothing is cut off for good.

The layout follows the place it sits in: a list in a narrow column, a grid of two to four columns on a wide page, a slider where space is tight. The colour scheme is light, dark, or automatic from the visitor’s system setting.

What the admin gets

One screen: “Settings → Google reviews”. At the top, the table of places: name, address, Place ID, rating, how many reviews are cached, when the last refresh happened, and the “Refresh”, “Disable” and “Delete” buttons. Below it: the Google connection, the look of the block, the filters, the WooCommerce placements, the manual reviews and the licence.

The key is stored encrypted in the database (AES-256-CBC with an HMAC), not as plain text, and the field only ever shows a mask. When Google refuses a request the plugin does not print “error 403” — it names the three things that actually cause it: Places API (New) is not enabled, no billing account is attached to the project, or the key is restricted to other sites.

How it works, step by step

1. You paste your own Google API key and save the connection.

2. In “Add a place” you type the name and the city (“Kolosok Bakery Kyiv”) or paste the Google Maps link to the business, and press “Find”. The plugin asks Google and shows the matches with address and rating — you just pick yours.

3. The plugin stores the Place ID and loads the reviews into the cache straight away.

4. You put the “Google reviews” block on the page you want, or the [catcode_google_reviews] shortcode into a template.

5. From there the cron does the work: once per cache window (12 hours by default) the plugin refreshes the answer. Visitors read the stored copy instead of poking Google on every page view.

The block and the shortcode

The “Google reviews” block sits in the “Widgets” category and renders a live preview right in the editor: change the place, the layout, the number of reviews, the columns or the theme and you see the result without reloading. The same options are available in the shortcode: [catcode_google_reviews layout="grid" columns="3" limit="6" theme="dark"].

WooCommerce placements

WooCommerce is not required for the plugin to run, but when it is there Pro turns on three automatic placements: a tab of its own on the product page, a block right under the product description, and a block on the thank-you page after an order — the moment when a buyer is most likely to leave a review themselves.

Why there is no schema markup

Competitors often sell “stars in the search results” — Review and AggregateRating markup for someone else’s reviews. We deliberately do not output it: Google’s structured data rules forbid marking up reviews collected on another platform, and what that earns is a manual action, not stars. The plugin shows reviews to people; it does not try to trick the search engine.

What it costs at Google

Reviews belong to the “Place Details Enterprise + Atmosphere” SKU, and Google gives every key a free monthly allowance per SKU. With one place and the default 12-hour window the plugin makes about two requests a day, comfortably inside that allowance. Set the window to one hour and connect a dozen places and the bill grows — and it is your bill, not ours. That is why the refresh window is a setting, and why it defaults to 12 hours.

Separately: Google’s terms allow keeping their content for 30 days at most. So the cache window is capped at 720 hours, and content past that window is not shown at all (only the manual reviews remain) instead of quietly breaking the rules.

What it costs

The Pro licence is 890 UAH per year for one domain, with a discount for a longer term: 2 years 1690, 3 years 2350, 4 years 2920, 5 years 3340 UAH. There are no automatic charges: renewal is manual, with email reminders 14, 7, 3 and 1 day before the end.

Before buying there are 7 days of Pro for free — no card, straight from the settings screen. When the licence term ends the plugin does not switch off: the free and Pro features keep working; only updates and support stop.

Under the hood

Google’s answer is kept in a single settings row rather than a transient: object caches drop transients whenever they feel like it, and every such drop is another billable Places call. The cache is refreshed by a cron event, not by a visitor, so the page never waits on Google and does not break when Google is unreachable.

The key is encrypted before it is written to the database. Review texts are never edited — Google’s rules require a review to be shown as it came; the filters decide whether a review is shown, never how it reads. The rating line stays honest either way: it shows the average Google reports, even when a filter hides some of the reviews.

The plugin is HPOS compatible, creates no tables of its own, and on uninstall removes every option and cron event it created.

Installation

1. “Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin”, pick the archive and activate it.

2. Open “Settings → Google reviews”.

3. Paste a Google API key with Places API (New) enabled and save the connection.

4. Find your business by name or by a Google Maps link and press “Choose this one”.

5. Put the “Google reviews” block on a page, or the [catcode_google_reviews] shortcode into a template.