Review sources

How to add Yell reviews to your website (UK listings)

3 September 2026 · JustReview

Most guides on how to add Yell reviews to your website skip the one step that decides whether anything shows up at all: which URL you paste. A Yell reviews widget reads a public listing page and renders the reviews it finds on your own domain, no API key and no partner application involved. But Yell hands you at least three different URLs while you are logged in, and only one of them is the listing. In our production data, connectors pointed at the right URL hold 2,830 reviews between them and connectors pointed at the other two hold none. Everything else about this source, the tone, the volume, the shelf life, follows from getting that first paste right.

We import Yell on behalf of paying UK businesses, so the rest of this is measured rather than guessed. Every figure below comes from our production database on 3 September 2026: 70 Yell connectors, 2,831 imported reviews, 42 accounts holding at least one. Yell is the former Yellow Pages, and the shape of what it returns is genuinely different from Google, in one way that helps you and one that does not.

The URL you paste decides whether anything imports

This is the whole game, and no other page we can find says it out loud. Yell listings live at yell.com/biz/business-name-town-1234567. That is the page a customer lands on from a search, and it is the page a widget can read. Two other URLs look plausible when you are logged into your own Yell account and both are dead ends.

The /editbusiness/ trap is the easy one to fall into. It is the address in your browser bar when you are editing your own listing, so it feels like “my Yell page”. It is not: it is an admin screen behind a login, and there is nothing on it for a widget to read. The /reviews/places/addreview/ link is the one you send to customers when you ask them for a review, which makes it the second most natural thing to copy and the second most useless thing to paste.

The last row deserves a note, because it is ours to own rather than Yell’s. Ten of our 70 Yell connectors were saved with no URL at all, and every one of them holds zero reviews. If you connect Yell and see nothing after a day, open the connector and check that the listing address actually saved. A source that quietly holds nothing looks identical to a source that is simply slow.

Yell reviews are never blank, and that is the reason to use them

Here is the number that made this post worth writing. Of the 2,831 Yell reviews we hold, zero are blank. Every single one carries a written body, averaging 194 characters. We filter nothing.

That is not normal. For exactly the same set of businesses, the same accounts in the same database, here is how their other sources compare.

One in eight Google reviews for these businesses is a bare star rating. On a page, that is a card with a name, five stars and an empty space where the argument should be. Yell never does that, because Yell’s review form asks for words rather than making them optional. If your goal is a testimonial wall that a visitor actually reads, Yell reviews are better raw material per review than Google reviews, and this is the only page we know of that will put a number on that.

The other half of the shape is less flattering, so here it is. Yell reviews average 4.92 stars, and 95.7% of them carry five. One and two star reviews together come to 1.66% of the total. That is a narrow, glowing distribution, which reads as marketing rather than evidence if it is the only thing on the page. The fix is not to hide it, it is to pool it with a source that has a wider spread. If you want the comparison across every source we handle, we published it in which review sources still work in 2026.

Yell is an archive, not a stream

The reason to be honest about this is that it changes what you build. Yell reviews for our customer base peaked five years ago and have been falling ever since, and the drop is not a rounding error.

One large account holds 1,322 of our 2,831 Yell reviews, 46.7% of the total, so the obvious question is whether that single business is bending the curve. It is not. Take it out and the same collapse remains: 320 reviews in 2023, then 72, then 35, then 26. The count of businesses still receiving any Yell review at all falls from 15 to 4 across the same window, which is the more telling half of the table.

In the 365 days to 3 September 2026 our accounts collected 36 Yell reviews. Six of those arrived in the last 30 days. The same businesses, over the same year, collected 305 new Google reviews. That is roughly eight new Google reviews for every one from Yell, on identical customer bases.

None of that makes Yell worthless. A decade of real, written, five-star reviews from UK trades and local services is a genuine asset, and it is sitting on yell.com where it works for Yell’s rankings rather than yours. It just means you should import it once for the depth and expect the freshness to come from somewhere else. 49 of our 70 Yell accounts already have Google connected too, which suggests most people work this out on their own.

Doing it, step by step

1. Open your Yell listing the way a customer would. Search your business name on yell.com and click the public result. The address should read yell.com/biz/.... If it reads /editbusiness/, you are logged in and looking at the admin screen. Log out or open a private window.
2. Copy that URL in full, including the trailing number. The number is the listing ID and it is the part that identifies you.
3. In JustReview, add a Yell source and paste it. The Yell reviews widget is the page that explains what the rendered result looks like.
4. Give the first import time. It reads the listing and pulls the history, so a listing with several hundred reviews takes longer than one with twelve.
5. Check the count before you embed anything. If it sits at zero, the URL is almost certainly the problem, not the import. That is the single most common failure in our data.
6. Add a second source, and in the UK that realistically means Google. Then choose which sources each widget shows, so the testimonial wall can lean on Yell’s full sentences while a summary badge stays current from Google.

The embed itself is one script tag and one container, the same on WordPress, Squarespace, Wix or hand written HTML. If you have not decided where reviews belong on the page yet, start with how to get reviews on your website instead, then come back for the connection.

Why use us for this

The practical case first. One paste of a public listing URL connects Yell with no API key, no partner programme and no minimum review count, which matters when your listing holds 40 reviews rather than 4,000. The same widget pools Yell with Google, Facebook and the rest, so you are not stuck presenting a source that is 95.7% five stars as if it were the whole picture. The reviews render on your own domain rather than inside a third-party frame. And you can see the count before you commit to anything, which is the check that catches the wrong-URL problem on day one. You can create an account and connect a listing without talking to a salesperson.

The caveats, since you would find them anyway. Yell is a small source in our book at 70 connectors, so we have less operational history with it than with Google. Nothing here makes a 2021 archive look like this month’s feedback, and if your Yell listing has been quiet for three years the widget will show that faithfully. And a source this concentrated on five stars is best used as one voice among several rather than the only one.

If you have a decade of written UK reviews sitting on someone else’s listing page, the useful move is to bring them onto your own. The Yell reviews widget is included on every paid plan, pricing is per account rather than per review, and the same connection handles Tripadvisor and the rest if your business collects reviews in more than one place.