WordPress is a popular software with a strong community behind it, so it comes to no surprise that there are plenty of powerful plugins built for it, including those for building review sites. However, there are times when you are better off with some other alternatives, for example if you’re new to website development and WordPress is still too complicated to handle, or if you’re on a budget.
Below are some noteworthy alternatives for building review sites. We will show you their strong points, why you might want to use them, and see if they better suit your needs.
WordPress GD Star Rating Plugin
GD Star Rating is a free plugin that you can use to create a review site. It has full support for single or multiple ratings and it allows visitor to vote on ratings and reviews, too. There are some visual customization options you can choose, and the plugin back-end offers some tweaking possibilities. It can be a good enough solution if you don’t need common review sites features like comparison tables, CSV imports, Google Maps, or Review Microformats. While free, you can still get premium support that costs an initial price of EUR 30 and a recurring EUR 15 per three months.
Niche Review Templates
If setting up WordPress is too complicated for you, you can try Niche Review Templates. A service aimed for those too busy to deal with website management, it supplies you with their own unique contents and is designed to run on autopilot once you set it up. They have various good looking templates you can use and also offers new autoresponder messages per month. They also offer 24/7 support and video tutorials are available to set up your site. The membership costs $47 per month.
Review Foundry
Review Foundry is a full-fledged web application that you will need to set up and configure on your own. The software has a good, detailed documentation for you to get things up and running, and it has some neat features such as on-the-fly product comparison table, various clean, good looking templates, visitor reviews, and more. Review Foundry costs between $232 to $784 depending on the license. One neat thing about Review Foundry is that you can download it for free and try it for 30 days before purchasing, so you can see first whether it matches your need or not.
ReviewAZON
ReviewAZON is a product review plugin for WordPress. As its name implies, it works by simplifying the process of fetching contents from Amazon and automatically adding it into your blog. You can also add Amazon’s customer reviews for the same product and show them on your blog. You then can earn commission on Amazon product purchases with the plugin’s integration with Amazon Affiliate program. Additionally, the plugin automatically grab the latest eBay auction for the same item, adding more related contents for your viewers. ReviewAZON costs $79. The plugin can go with any WordPress theme, but they also offer theme packages from time to time.
