How To Include Testimonials On Your Wordpress Site

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The following is a guest post from Glenn Nicholas from PublicityShip.  Thank you very much for writing this guest article.

A lot of marketers will tell you that including testimonials from satisfied clients can help build trust and improve online conversion rates.  But if you’ve been using testimonials, you’ll know just how much work it can be to collect and publish them.  And that its all too easy for a few testimonials to appear over and over. This is missing an opportunity with your repeat readers (your most valuable readers).
Jodi Diehl of SunFrogServices has made the task of gathering, managing and displaying testimonials so much easier through her WP-Testimonials plugin.  And not only that, she has randomized the display of testimonials, which makes your testimonials fresh for repeat visitors.  Simple and effective.

The best way to learn about Jodi’s plugin is to see it in action on her site at WP-Testimonials. Look at the testimonial in the sidebar, and notice how it changes to another testimonial when you read another page on her site (a new testimonial is selected at random each time a page is returned).

We use Jodi’s plugin on our own site at PublicityShip.  We’ve extended her plugin in a few small ways, including a link to our full list of testimonials at the bottom of the widget.  The testimonials were so useful we introduced a second sidebar, as we didn’t want the testimonials to be lost ‘below the fold’.

One of the best aspect’s of the widget is the use of a simple form to enter the testimonial details - short version for the sidebar widget, longer version for your /testimonials page, and client name, organization and web address.  All you do is enter the details using this form, and from there on the new testimonial starts to appear along with your existing testimonials.

Note: this is a new plugin, and installation may require a few tweaks - see the comments for the plugin if you have trouble.  if you want to use this plugin with Wordpress 2.3, you will need to include this fix until the core plugin is updated.

Replace this line in wp-testimonials.php:

require_once(ABSPATH . ‘wp-admin/upgrade-functions.php’);

to this:

if( file_exists( ABSPATH . ‘wp-admin/includes/upgrade.php’ ))

require_once(ABSPATH . ‘wp-admin/includes/upgrade.php‘);

else

require_once(ABSPATH . ‘wp-admin/upgrade-functions.php’);

Glenn Nicholas