Universal Reviews

Description

Universal Reviews is a flexible WordPress review plugin for sites that need more than a basic comment-based rating system.

Use it for WooCommerce stores, services, directories, local businesses, courses, memberships, agencies and custom WordPress sites. Reviews can be attached to posts, products, taxonomy terms, users, the whole business or another supported target.

Reviews are stored in dedicated, indexed database tables rather than comments or post meta. Rating summaries are precomputed, so public review lists and summaries do not need to run COUNT(*) against the reviews table on every page view.

The plugin is designed to keep the everyday workflow simple:

1. Create or adjust a review form.
2. Place the form and review list on your site.
3. Moderate incoming reviews.
4. Reply, feature or verify reviews when appropriate.
5. Display the rating summary and approved reviews to visitors.

Collect reviews

• Create review forms with a drag-and-drop field builder.
• Rating field is included by default and uses a 1–5 whole-star scale.
• Available field types include rating, heading, text, textarea, select, radio, checkbox, number, email, URL, phone, date and hidden fields.
• Mark fields as required, use half-width layouts, add placeholders and help text, and assign custom CSS classes.
• Add headings and text blocks between fields with configurable HTML tag, size, color and alignment.
• Custom field answers are saved with the review and available to moderators.
• Import and export form templates as JSON.
• Preview forms before publishing them.
• Create review types such as Product, Service or Place, each with its own moderation policy, allowed targets and schema.org type.

Protect submissions

Universal Reviews includes several layers of basic anti-abuse protection without requiring a CAPTCHA.

• Honeypot field.
• Signed time trap with an expiring token.
• Per-IP rate limiting.
• One-review-per-person-per-item protection within a configurable time window.
• Consent checkbox.
• Same-site origin validation.
• Validation of review types and public targets.
• HTTP 429 responses when the configured rate limit is exceeded.

Default protection includes a limit of 12 submissions per 60 minutes per IP and a 72-hour duplicate-review window.

Moderate reviews

The React-powered admin dashboard gives moderators a focused place to work through incoming reviews.

• Filter reviews by status.
• Search and sort reviews.
• Cursor-based pagination for large review collections.
• Approve, reject, mark as spam, trash, feature or delete reviews.
• Apply moderation actions individually or in bulk.
• Reply to reviews as the site owner.
• Mark reviews as verified.
• View the original form answers.
• Keep a review change history.
• Receive a daily digest when reviews are waiting for moderation.
• Disable the digest with the unirev_digest_enabled filter.

The moderation interface uses server-side filtering, sorting and pagination so the browser does not need to load the complete review database.

Display reviews

Add reviews to your site with shortcodes or Gutenberg blocks.

Available shortcodes:

[unirev_form]

[unirev_reviews]

[unirev_summary]

The Reviews List and Review Form blocks are server-rendered and can be used from the WordPress block editor.

Front-end features include:

• Rating summary with average rating and total review count.
• 5-to-1 star distribution.
• Star-rating filtering such as 4+ stars.
• Helpful votes.
• Owner replies.
• Verified review badges.
• Keyboard-friendly star selection.
• Inline validation and form status messages.
• Loading and success states.
• Theme-friendly CSS variables using the --unirev-* naming system.

Plugin CSS and JavaScript are loaded only on pages that actually render a Universal Reviews widget.

SEO and structured data

Universal Reviews can output AggregateRating JSON-LD for supported public review targets.

Structured data is printed only when the page actually displays the target’s review list or summary and the target has approved reviews. The plugin uses the schema.org type configured for the review type and avoids outputting review structured data for private content.

This keeps structured data tied to the content visitors can actually see rather than adding review markup site-wide.

Important: structured data does not guarantee rich results in search engines. Search engines decide whether and how eligible structured data is displayed.

Performance

Universal Reviews is designed for larger review collections.

• Reviews use dedicated database tables.
• Important review, moderation and lookup queries are indexed.
• Rating totals and distributions are precomputed.
• Public review lists and summaries do not run COUNT(*) on the reviews table for every page view.
• Background jobs support retry, cancellation and recovery from stuck jobs.
• Jobs and logs older than 30 days are automatically purged.
• Optional persistent object caching such as Redis or Memcached can make repeated public queries cheaper, but it is not required.

The architecture is intended to remain practical as a site grows from hundreds of reviews to much larger collections.

Import, export and diagnostics

The Tools area includes:

• Streaming CSV export.
• Streaming JSON export.
• Spreadsheet formula-injection protection during export.
• Batched CSV import with up to 5,000 rows per file.
• Row-level import errors.
• Background jobs.
• Job retry and cancellation.
• Logs.
• Database table-size diagnostics.
• Automatic cleanup of old jobs and logs.

Privacy

Privacy controls are built into the review workflow.

• Reviewer IP addresses are not stored by default.
• WordPress privacy exporter integration.
• WordPress privacy eraser integration.
• Custom form answers are included in privacy handling.
• Erasing personal data anonymises reviewer name, email and IP where applicable while keeping the review text as a business record.
• Optional data-retention settings.
• Review data remains after deactivation.
• Data is deleted on uninstall only when “Delete all data on uninstall” is enabled.
• Multisite sites manage their own uninstall-data setting.
• No telemetry is sent by the plugin.

Always configure retention, consent and privacy settings according to your site’s legal and business requirements.

Shortcodes

Review form

[unirev_form]

Default attributes:

• slug — Form slug. Default: unirev_form.
• type — Review type. Default: product.
• target_type — Target type. Default: post.
• target_id — Target ID. Defaults to the current supported post when available.

Example:

[unirev_form type="product" target_type="post" target_id="123"]

Review list

[unirev_reviews]

Available attributes:

• type
• target_type
• target_id
• per_page
• sort
• min_rating
• allow_rating_filter
• show_form

Example:

[unirev_reviews type="product" target_type="post" target_id="123" per_page="10" show_form="1"]

Rating summary

[unirev_summary]

Available attributes:

• type
• target_type
• target_id

Example:

[unirev_summary type="product" target_type="post" target_id="123"]

Supported target types include:

• post — WordPress posts and supported post types.
• product — WooCommerce products.
• term — taxonomy terms.
• user — users.
• business — the business/site target.

Blocks

Reviews List

Block name: unirev/reviews-list

Attributes:

• reviewType
• targetType
• targetId
• perPage
• sort
• minRating
• allowRatingFilter

Review Form

Block name: unirev/review-form

Attributes:

• formSlug
• reviewType
• targetType
• targetId

Both blocks are server-rendered.

[unirev_reviews show_form=1]