Free Star Rating WordPress Plugins

Free star rating WordPress plugins system on your site can help people to review content and products & pass more safely, check the best ones

By Claudio Pires
Updated on September 2, 2023
Free Star Rating WordPress Plugins

A Good star rating system can help people review and evaluate the content, product, or anything else they want and pass more safety and community participation to your site views. See in this post the best free star rating WordPress plugins for this purpose.

Best Free Star Rating WordPress Plugins

WordPress is the most straightforward and robust solution to host a blog or a website – it’s so good that even big companies run their sites on WordPress. All it was meant to be was a tool to help writers improve their typography – what it is now is the best blogging tool anyone could ask for, with millions of users and millions more viewing sites built-in WordPress.

While being open source – it’s pretty astonishing what people can achieve when they build a product for themselves. Being open source has plenty of advantages; you get better security when you are open source because you can be sure there are no backdoors when the code gets audited by random people worldwide every day. Not only that, but most open-source software is free for obvious reasons – that is what made WordPress so big and famous, the freedom to do anything with it for free.

Thousands of WordPress plugins add features to your website that WordPress does not support by default. Of course, there are hundreds more that offer the same features but with different functionality. Today we will discuss one such quality and the options you have to implement this feature – star ratings.

Alt Options For Star Rating WordPress Plugins

There is a different, more common alternative to ratings, which is built into WordPress by default – comments, but comments have a problem; Comments take a while to write, require your visitors to donate more of their time than usual, and above all that, your visitors need to have something worthwhile to say – this of course results in less engagement than you would like to see perhaps.

However, a star that your visitors can click to leave their opinion? Now that’s fast and easy and requires no significant effort from your visitors. That’s what these star-rating plugins for WordPress offer. Here are a few of them that do the same thing – mostly, but that has been chiefly the keyword here. Pick any WordPress star-rating plugins that replicate what you want as closely as possible.

1. The Ultimate Editorial Rating – Rating & Review plugin for WordPress

The Ultimate Editorial Rating – Rating & Review plugin for WordPress - Visualmodo

The Ultimate Editorial Rating, an innovative, Free (also have paid version) WordPress plugin that significantly enhances your website’s functionality by incorporating a comprehensive array of essential features. Elevate your WordPress and eCommerce sites with Multi-criteria Ratings, Total Score Calculation, Review Schema, Pros and Cons Highlights, and more. Crafted to captivate, this plugin adds flair to your site with eye-catching Rating Widgets, inviting your visitors to stay longer. Ready to unlock your website’s potential? Dive into the Ultimate Editorial Rating experience now!

Discover the key features that will skyrocket your website’s growth: Comprehensive Multi-Criteria Rating & Reviews, Dynamic Editorial Rating System, Invaluable Customer Reviews, Customizable Rating Widgets, SEO-boosting Review Schema, and more. Engage visitors with multi-faceted feedback and build trust through impartial Editorial Ratings.

Boost your SEO strategy with structured data support, while the Pros and Cons feature enables seamless product comparisons. Add Product Buttons for effective calls to action and enjoy compatibility with WordPress and WooCommerce. Plus, stay ahead with regular updates for peak performance.

Why choose the Ultimate Editorial Ratings WordPress Plugin? It offers high-quality coding, 24/7 expert support, and an enhanced user experience. Elevate your website’s SEO and credibility, drive conversion rates, and foster user engagement. Customize the plugin to match your website’s aesthetics with ease. Experience a user-friendly interface, smart product review features, and seamless WordPress integration. With ongoing support and updates, you’re in capable hands with the Ultimate Editorial Ratings team. Elevate your website today and watch it flourish!

Download Link

2. GD Star Rating

Free Star Rating WordPress Plugins
Free Star Rating WordPress Plugins

Download Link

GD Rating System has a modular approach, with most features divided between add-ons or rating methods. With the help of the plugin, you can allow users to rate anything on your website. We will get support for different rating entities, and each entity will be accompanied by even more rating types. Moreover, we will get a rating method using a star rating at a basic level.

You can enhance this further by applying add-ons for post-integration, comment integration, Dynamic Load, Rich Snippet support, Feeds support, and Shortcake UI plugin support. In addition, get posts and comments from Addon, which offers a sort-by-rating feature.

The star ratings come with over twenty font-based icons and two image-based sets. You will also get a shortcode for the rating list, a default set of templates, a shortcode for the rating block, and more features. All these are available in the free version, and you go for the Pro version if you want even more flexibility with your rating system.

For example, suppose you wish for a thumbs rating system, bbPress integration, BuddyPress integration, more fonts, Dummy ratings, and similar features. In that case, all these will come with the pro version of the GD rating system.

3. WP PostRatings: Star Rating WordPress Plugins

Download Link

WP PostRatings is for essential people with basic needs. The plugin doesn’t overcomplicate things and adds an AJAX rating system to any post or page to get its job done. Even though it is pretty basic, it is not mundane. You can choose from a range of rating images, including the customary 5-star image or even bars, squares, and the dichotomous thumbs up or down. You can also use numbers and hearts if you so desire.

Another impressive feature of the plugin is that you can set the rating value for each rating option and allow permission to submit a rating to your post or page.

4. Multi Rating

Download Link

Multi Rating also offers a paid version at 35$ USD; that’s not monthly. It’s probably the closest you can get to Rating Widget in terms of feature parity – but it does have some unique features, such as showing the rating in a drop-down menu instead of the causal stars, or perhaps radio buttons are what you fancy. As a result, one of the best free star rating WordPress plugins.

5. YASR – Yet Another Star Rating

Free Star Rating WordPress Plugins
Free Star Rating WordPress Plugins

Download Link

Yet Another Star Rating or YASR, in short, is quite humble with its name – but it packs some great features. It’s based on an older jQuery plugin called “RateIT, “and that’s about where the similarities end. YASR will let you create multiple-star ratings for different aspects of your posts and even integrates the ratings in Google search indexing.

6. Like Button Rating ♥ LikeBtn

Download Link

The Like Button rating could be a great option if you are looking for social ratings instead of just star ratings. The like ratings could be added to posts, pages, forums, custom post types, WooCommerce products, and even comments. The plugin settings include almost 80 parameter options, real-time reports, and voting statistics.

7. KK Star Rating WordPress Plugins

Download Link

KK Star Ratings also supports the Google Rich Snippets – thus, its ratings get indexed by Google. Still, it also features various animations when you mouse over the stars, and you can decide how many leads you want. It also comes with a sidebar widget that you can add to show the top-rated posts.

8. Rating Widget: Star Review System

Download Link

Rating-Widget is packed with features – but it comes with its branding plastered everywhere. Unless you want to pay 3.99$/mo to remove the branding, there are two more tiers where it adds even more features than it usually comes with. Rating-Widget has too many features to list, so you should check them out yourself. Whether it’s worth it depends on what you want from it.

9. WP Star Rating

Download Link

WP Star Rating also uses AJAX, much in the same way as MN Star Rating – except it is a bit less complex in that it offers you simple and straight options to customize the plugin. It lets you pick how many stars you want to show and whether or not guests can vote. You would rather hide the rating result from your users? Can do. It even works with custom post types.

10. Rate my Post – WP Rating System

Rate My Posts – WP Rating System is an easy way to add rating functionality to your WordPress site. Visitors can rate your posts/pages and send you private feedback after rating. The ability to create custom scoring widgets that work independently of posts and pages is available in the PRO version.

What sets Rate my Post apart from other WordPress rating plugins is its simplicity, functionality, and impact on engagement. It works with any page caching plugin and is probably the most customizable free WordPress comments plugin.

11. Site Reviews

Website Reviews allow your visitors to leave a 1 to 5-star rating on your website, just like you do on TripAdvisor or Yelp. The plugin provides blocks, shortcodes, and widgets, along with complete documentation.

You can pin your best comments always to show them first, request approval before posting new comment submissions, require visitors to log in to write words, send custom notifications about new submissions, and more!

12. Elementor + Borderless Star Rating WordPress Plugins

Using the famous free website builder plugin with the Borderless WordPress plugin by Visualmodo, you’ll be able to create a page like the one in the video below.

Honorable Mention / Outdated & Non-Recommended Start Rating WordPress Plugins

We want to mention and say thank you to those plugin devs.

1. Post Star Rating

Download Link

Post Star Rating is still in its infancy – it’s very new, so it’s not that heavy on features. However, that allows you to influence the features it will add eventually – it might not serve your purposes at the moment, but it might be a better bet in the long term. What it is right now is an excellent old 5-star rating system.

2. Cosmick Star Rating (Honorable Mention / Outdated)

Download Link

There’s not much cosmic about this, perhaps that’s why there’s a K involved, but that doesn’t stop it from being a must-have WordPress plugin – this plugin will let you add the star rating wherever you want with a shortcode. It sounds similar to the “Star Rating” plugin – however, this one also supports Google Rich Snippets, so the ratings get indexed by Google. It also features a sidebar widget to show the latest reviews.

3. MN Star Rating (Honorable Mention / Outdated)

Download Link

MN Star Rating is one of the more complex plugins – it uses AJAX to make the user experience more fluid for the visitors. It lets the webmasters customize the CSS of the ratings so that they can contribute to this user experience. However, with all that complexity – it’s still quite an easy plugin to install and use for a webmaster.

4. EC Star Rating (Honorable Mention / Outdated)

Download Link

EC Star Rating is a highly lightweight plugin – all it serves is a tiny bit of CSS and HTML, and the rest is the magic of Javascript. Very basic, very simple, and that’s intentional. It will offer you no more than the bare minimum – keeping your page load times as low as possible while still giving you the rating system you require.

5. SN Rating (Honorable Mention / Outdated)

Download Link

Last but not least – SN Rating. It is not the least because it offers something unique – some basic analytics in the free version. You still get your customization options, albeit not as deep as some of the other plugins discussed here, but you get some really good analytical data – and there is no paid version, so it is entirely free. Worth a try if it fits your needs, you get analytics as a bonus!

6. Star Rating (Honorable Mention / Outdated)

Download Link

This is possibly the simplest of these; it lets you display the star rating wherever you want via shortcodes. It also has a responsive WordPress admin panel and enables you to decide if you want to limit one rating per visitor or if you want it to be unlimited.

Star Rating WordPress Plugins Conclusion

These are some of the WordPress star-rating plugins we think might serve your needs. If they don’t, you can find a hundred more similar plugins that might – and if nothing does, get your hands on the code yourself and create your plugin. WordPress is entirely open-source, letting you reference its code for the best optimization and giving you the foundation needed for a plugin ecosystem.

Claudio Pires

Claudio Pires is the co-founder of Visualmodo, a renowned company in web development and design. With over 15 years of experience, Claudio has honed his skills in content creation, web development support, and senior web designer. A trilingual expert fluent in English, Portuguese, and Spanish, he brings a global perspective to his work. Beyond his professional endeavors, Claudio is an active YouTuber, sharing his insights and expertise with a broader audience. Based in Brazil, Claudio continues to push the boundaries of web design and digital content, making him a pivotal figure in the industry.