Bpers Review Count and Rating

Description

If your rating and review count are typed into a dozen pages, they are wrong the moment the count changes. Bpers Review Count and Rating gives you one place to set them, and every page that uses a shortcode or the block updates together.

It works with any review platform. Add as many sources as you like, one per platform or one per branch, and each keeps its own figures.

Typing the figures in is a first class way to use this plugin. Most review platforms publish no free way to read a business score automatically, so a plugin that insists on an API simply cannot support them. Here, entering the numbers by hand is the normal path, and automatic syncing is an option on the platforms that offer it.

What you get

• One screen for every review source on the site.
• Shortcodes for the rating, the count, the count rounded down, stars, a full badge, and a link to your review page.
• A block for the block editor, and a widget for Elementor.
• Combined figures: total reviews and a count weighted average rating across every platform at once, correct even when platforms score out of different maximums.
• Part filled stars drawn as shapes, so a 4.3 does not round up to five stars and the display does not depend on which emoji font the visitor has.
• Optional automatic syncing from Google, once a day, in the background.

Built so the numbers stay right

• Page caches are cleared when the figures change. Without that, a site behind a caching plugin keeps serving yesterday’s numbers and looks broken.
• A bad fetch cannot wipe your numbers. If a sync comes back with a lower review count or a rating that jumped, the figure is held for you to approve rather than published.
• Nothing goes stale in silence. If a source stops syncing, its fetched figures are dropped after a window you choose and the figures you typed take over. Site Health reports how long each source has gone without a sync.
• The front end never makes an HTTP request. Figures are read from a single small autoloaded option. Syncing happens on a schedule, never during a page load.
• Your API key is not autoloaded. Credentials live in an option that is only read in the admin and on cron, never on a front end request.

Shortcodes

Add source="key" to any of these to name a source. Without it, the default source is used.

• [rvnum_rating] the rating on its own
• [rvnum_count] the exact review count
• [rvnum_count_rounded step="25"] the count rounded down, never up
• [rvnum_stars] stars, including part filled ones
• [rvnum_badge] name, rating, stars and count together
• [rvnum_link text="Read our reviews"] a link to your review page
• [rvnum_label] the platform name
• [rvnum_total] every source added together
• [rvnum_average] every source averaged, weighted by review count

WP-CLI

wp rvnum list
wp rvnum sync
wp rvnum sync --source=google
wp rvnum set google --rating=4.9 --count=231

External services

This plugin makes no external connection unless you configure a source for automatic syncing. With every source left on manual, which is the default, it never contacts anything.

If you switch a Google source to automatic, the plugin sends one request a day to the Google Places API at https://places.googleapis.com/v1/places/{place-id}, from your server, on a scheduled task. Each request contains the Place ID and the API key you entered. No visitor data, no personal data and no information about your site’s traffic is sent, and no request is ever made during a visitor’s page load.

The rating and review count returned are stored in your own database so that pages can be rendered without contacting Google, and are deleted once they pass the staleness window you set under Display and sync.

Using this feature means agreeing to Google’s terms, which govern how their content may be stored and require attribution to be shown alongside it. Read them before switching it on:

• Google Maps Platform Terms of Service: https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/terms/
• Google Maps Platform Service Specific Terms: https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/terms/maps-service-terms
• Google Privacy Policy: https://policies.google.com/privacy

Google requires a billing card on the Cloud project before it will issue a key, even when usage stays inside the free allowance.