How to display reviews on your website

If you're wondering how to display reviews on your website without them looking staged or falling foul of the rules, you're asking the right question. Most trade websites either bury genuine reviews on a forgotten page, or go the other way and stuff the homepage with five-star quotes that read like nobody actually wrote them.

Since 2024, faking or manipulating reviews isn't just bad practice in the UK: it's a specific offence under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act. Paying for glowing reviews, getting staff or family to post them, or hiding genuine bad ones can all land a business in trouble with Trading Standards. So getting this right matters more than it used to.

🛠️ Getting reviews you can actually use

The best reviews come from asking at the right moment, not from chasing people months later. The point right after a job is signed off, invoice paid, customer happy, is when people are most willing to write something specific. A text or email with a direct link to your Google Business Profile or Checkatrade listing works better than a generic "please review us" message.

Ask a specific question rather than "leave us a review": something like "what made you choose us, and how did the job go?" gets you detail. Detail is what makes a review believable and useful to the next customer trying to decide between you and three other quotes.

Avoid asking employees, friends or family, even if they genuinely used your services. Most review platforms explicitly ban this, and it's an easy way to get reviews pulled or your account flagged.

🚫 What counts as faking it

Faking doesn't always mean writing reviews that never happened. It also covers:

• Offering a discount or freebie in exchange for a five-star review without disclosing that clearly
• Only asking happy customers and quietly ignoring the ones who had a problem
• Posting reviews under a different name for your own business
• Buying reviews in bulk from a third party

Cherry-picking is the one that catches most small businesses out. It's not illegal to only display your best reviews on your own site, but it becomes a problem if you're actively suppressing or hiding negative ones on the platform where they were left, or misrepresenting your overall score.

💻 How to display reviews on your website properly

Once you've got genuine reviews, showing them well is straightforward:

Pull from the source, don't retype. Screenshotting or embedding a widget from Google, Checkatrade or Trustpilot is safer than copying the text into your own page, because it's verifiable. Most platforms offer a free embeddable widget for exactly this reason.

Link back to the platform. A "see all our reviews on Checkatrade" link does more for trust than the quote itself. It tells the visitor there's a paper trail they can check.

Show a spread, not just the perfect ones. A page with twelve five-star reviews and zero mention of anything less looks curated. Genuine trade profiles usually have the odd four-star review about a delay or a scheduling hiccup. Leaving one or two of those in makes the rest more believable.

Keep them current. A testimonials page last updated three years ago reads as neglected, not established. Refreshing it every few months is a small job: on a WebCheap care plan (£95/month) this kind of update is exactly the sort of thing that gets done as routine maintenance rather than something that sits on a to-do list for a year.

Use structured data if your site supports it. Review markup can help genuine reviews show as star ratings in Google search results, which is a solid trust signal before someone even clicks through.

📋 The practical checklist

Before you publish anything on the reviews page:

1. Confirm every quote is from a real, identifiable customer (initials and location is enough, you don't need full names)
2. Link at least one review back to the platform it came from
3. Include at least one review that isn't a perfect five stars, if you have one
4. Update the page when new reviews come in, not once a year
5. Never offer payment or discounts for a review without disclosing it on the review itself

Getting reviews is slow work and there's no shortcut worth the legal risk. But displaying the ones you've earned properly, linked, dated, and not too polished, does more for a new visitor's trust than any number of stock testimonials ever will. If your current site doesn't have anywhere sensible to put them, a reviews page is one of the cheaper additions to build in (from £25/page on top of a £395 base build), and it's often the page that gets someone to actually pick up the phone.