Industries

Where to put reviews on your website: data from 282 live homepages

10 October 2026 · JustReview

Put reviews where the decision happens and where people still are. That means a compact star rating with the review count in the first screen, next to the headline or the main button; a block of full reviews directly after you explain what you sell, before the price or the contact form; and a dedicated reviews page linked from the menu. The footer is the weakest default, because it is the part of the page the fewest visitors reach. Most sites put reviews much lower: when we rendered the homepages of 282 live sites running our widget, the first review block in the page content sat a median of four screens down, and only one in nine of those blocks started in the first screen.

The scan ran on 10 October 2026. The widget-type figures come from our API logs for 8 September to 10 October 2026.

How we measured it

We used two sources, because neither answers the question on its own.

The first is our API log. Every widget asks our server for its reviews, and the shape of that request gives away the widget type. Over 33 days, 316 accounts made such requests from their own sites on at least five separate days in our server log, which is our working definition of a widget that is really installed rather than tried once. What the log cannot tell us is the page. By default, browsers send only the domain, not the full address, when a page calls another site: 90.5% of the requests carried just the domain, 8.6% carried nothing, and 0.9% carried a full address. So the log tells us what people install, not where.

The second source answers where. We took every domain that displayed our widget on at least five days in the last 30, 371 of them, opened each homepage in a headless browser at 1440 by 900 pixels, scrolled to the bottom so lazy-loaded sections appeared, and recorded where each widget’s top edge sat. 329 homepages loaded, 282 of them loaded our script, and 158 showed a review widget inside the page content. This covers homepages only. Product pages, pricing pages and dedicated review pages were not part of the scan.

Which widgets sites actually install

The last row is a group because those three widgets send identical requests, so the log cannot separate them. The rendered homepages can, and we come back to them below. Shares add up to more than 100% because 152 accounts, 48.1%, run more than one type. The other 164 use exactly one, and for 100 of them that one is the testimonials carousel.

There is a mismatch worth noticing already. A third of accounts run a Reviews Page widget, yet we found it on only 4 of the 282 homepages. That is the correct outcome: a full reviews page belongs on its own address, which is what the widget is built for.

Where the first review block lands on the homepage

On the 158 homepages with a review widget in the content, the median page was 6,373 pixels tall and the first widget started 3,550 pixels down, at 58.7% of the page’s height. On a 900-pixel screen that is 3.9 screens of scrolling before a visitor reaches the review block.

The third quarter is the crowded one, and there is a likely reason. Many themes and page-builder templates lay out a homepage in roughly the same order: a hero, logos or a feature grid, an explanation of how it works, then testimonials, then pricing or a contact form, then the footer. Site owners tend to fill the testimonials slot where the template put it. That slot is not wrong, but it is late, and it is the only review block in the content on 143 of the 158 pages.

Why lower on the page means fewer readers

Every screen a visitor has to scroll loses some of them. How many depends on the page, so we will not quote a universal figure, but the direction is not in doubt: the audience at screen four is a subset of the audience at screen one, and the people who leave first are exactly the undecided first-time visitors that reviews are meant to persuade. A review block in the last quarter mostly reassures people who were already interested enough to read to the end.

You can check this on your own site. Google Analytics 4 records a scroll event when a visitor reaches 90% of the page, if enhanced measurement is on. Compare the number of those events on your homepage with its page views and you have the share of visitors who get to the bottom. If your reviews sit below the fold, that ratio is roughly the ceiling on how many people ever see them. For finer steps, a scroll-depth trigger in Google Tag Manager can fire at 25%, 50% and 75%.

The small elements already go to the top

Not every widget lands low. The 12 homepages using the Stars widget, a single line of stars with the rating, had it at a median of 3.5% of the page height, in the hero. It measured a median of 40 pixels tall, against 673 for a testimonials block, which is why it fits there. Counters sat at a median of 16%. The badge is the other exception: it is fixed to a corner of the screen, so it stays in view on every screen as the visitor scrolls, and 113 of the 282 homepages, 40.1%, used one.

That points to the plan that works. Put a small element at the top, where it costs almost no space, and the full list lower, where there is room for it. The two do different jobs. The star line says “other people rate this well” before the visitor has read anything; the list proves it to the ones who want to check.

Where each widget type belongs

Two details matter more than the exact slot. First, show the count beside the stars: “4.8 from 212 reviews” carries weight that “4.8” alone does not. Second, if your page is long, a second, shorter review block next to the final call to action earns its place, because the visitor who reached the form is the one deciding. Only 15 of the 158 homepages had a second review block at all.

Beyond the homepage

Most sites we scanned had the widget on the homepage, 282 of the 329 that loaded, but the homepage is often not where the decision is made. On product pages the order is different again: a rating under the product name, one review beside the buy button, the full list lower down, as covered in our guide to reviews on product pages. On a pricing page, the reviews belong between the plans and the sign-up button; in our scan of 25 SaaS pricing pages only 3 showed a review-platform badge there and none showed the rating as text. On a contact or booking page, put a short rating directly above the form or the phone number, because that is the last page before the visitor commits.

On a phone, the same block is further away

We rendered the same homepages again at 390 by 844 pixels, a common phone size, and got a measurement for 126 of them. Columns stack on a phone, so the median page grew from 6,342 to 8,730 pixels, and the first review block moved from 3,556 to 4,717 pixels down. In screens, that is 5.6 on the phone against 4.0 on the desktop for the same pages. On 107 of the 126 pages it took more screens to reach the reviews on the phone, typically 1.4 times as many, and only 12 started the block in the first screen.

The floating badge thins out too. 33 of these pages showed a badge on the desktop and 22 still showed it on the phone; the other 11 hid it on small screens, which the badge settings allow. That leaves the star line in the hero as the one review element a phone visitor reliably sees, so it is the last thing to cut from a mobile layout, not the first. If the testimonials block is long, a carousel that shows one review at a time keeps it from pushing everything below it further down.

Check that the widget renders at all

Placement only matters if the widget appears. Of the 282 homepages that loaded our script, 54 showed no review widget at all. Eleven of those load the script on every page while the widget lives on a subpage, which is harmless. Five had a widget container with zero height. The other 38, 13.5% of the homepages, asked our server for reviews and then had no widget container anywhere on the page, so the reviews were downloaded for nothing. That is what happens when the container element is removed, by a theme change or a page-builder edit for example, while the script stays in the template; we saw the same pattern in our PrestaShop measurements. After any redesign, open the page in a private window, scroll to where the reviews should be, and look.

Where we fit

We are built for the “small element at the top, full list lower down” plan, and that is the reason to use us for it: one script gives you every element in the table above, fed from the same reviews. The Stars widget for the hero line, a floating badge you can pin to any corner and hide on phones while the visitor scrolls, a testimonials carousel for the middle of the page, counters and a summary for beside the form, and a full Reviews Page for its own URL. You choose the sources for each widget, Google, Facebook, Booking, Etsy and the rest, and on Pro you can show only reviews in the page’s language. The embed steps are on our Google reviews widget page, and the plan for each widget is on the pricing page.

The caveats, stated plainly. The free plan includes the badge only; testimonials, counters and the summary start on Plus, and the Stars widget and the Reviews Page on Pro. We do not choose the position for you: the widget goes wherever you paste the code, and on the 129 homepages where the testimonials carousel was the first review block, it started a median of 59% of the way down. And our figures describe homepages, not every page of a site.

If your reviews currently start four screens down, moving them is a ten-minute job. Create an account, connect the source your customers already review you on, and put a star line in the hero before you touch anything else.