Hotels
Guests who found you on an OTA are looking at your own site to decide whether to book direct. Reviews are what close that.
Review widgets for restaurants
Your reviews are on Google, Tripadvisor, OpenTable and the delivery apps. Your website shows none of them. This fixes that.
The sources that matter for a restaurant
Diners check more places than most businesses have to worry about, and they check them in a particular order: Google while searching, Tripadvisor if they are visiting, the delivery app if they are eating at home.
| Source | Matters for | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Local search, Maps, opening hours | The one that brings people through the door | |
| Tripadvisor | Tourists and visitors | Disproportionately important if you are near anything people travel for |
| OpenTable | Bookings | Reviews come from people who actually turned up |
| Yelp | US diners | Worth showing; note Yelp asks you not to solicit reviews |
| Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub | Delivery | Different customers from the ones sitting in your room |
| TheFork, Zomato | Europe, and India and the Gulf | Regional, and often where the volume actually is |
Where to put reviews on a restaurant website
Under the hero on the homepage, where someone deciding between three places you appeared alongside can see the difference in twenty seconds. On the menu page, because that is where people spend the most time. And on the booking page, immediately beside the button.
A floating badge showing the rating works well across the rest of the site — it travels with the visitor without occupying a section. Restaurant sites are often heavy on photography and short on text, so a small persistent signal does more than one big block nobody scrolls to.
Showing reviews in more than one language
If you are somewhere with visitors, your reviews arrive in several languages and most of them are unreadable to most of your customers. Auto-translation renders them all in the language the site is set to, which turns a wall of mixed text into something a visitor can actually read. It is on Pro and above.
Asking diners for reviews
The receipt and the table are the two moments that work, and both are physical, so a QR code beats a link. Print it on the bill, on a table card, on the takeaway bag.
Two rules worth knowing. Google allows asking but not incentivising — no free dessert for a review. Yelp asks you not to solicit at all, which many restaurants find out after a filter has quietly removed a batch of reviews. More on asking for reviews.
Questions
Other industries
Local business
Most people who find you have already looked at your Google rating. The job of your website is to confirm it rather than to introduce it.
Beauty & salons
Salons and studios are chosen on photographs and reviews, in that order, and both need to be on the page a new client lands on.
Ecommerce
Reviews on a product page are the last thing between a visitor and the buy button, which is why placement matters more here than anywhere else.