Reviews on a product page: where and how many to show

Why does placement matter for product page reviews?

A shopper lands on your product from a search, on a phone, with one question: is this any good? If the answer is three swipes and a tap away, many will not go looking. They will judge the product by the photo and the price and leave, or buy and be surprised.

So the question worth asking is where each part of the reviews goes. A product page needs two different things: a quick signal near the price, and the reviews themselves for people who want to read.

Where should reviews go on a product page?

Put a one-line rating right under the product name: the stars, the average as a number and the count, such as “4.8 · 12 reviews”. Make the whole line a link that jumps to the reviews. This is the part almost everyone sees, because it sits next to the price, where the decision happens.

Put the reviews in their own open section below the description, with a heading. Below the description works because by then the shopper knows what the product is and wants to know what owners think of it. Keep that section open rather than tucked into a tab, especially on phones, where tabs look like one more menu and are easy to scroll past.

If you only have one or two reviews, both still belong there. If you have none, do not show five empty stars or “0 reviews”, which reads like a warning; show a “Write a review” link instead. The home page and the collection pages have their own rules, which we covered in how to show reviews on your homepage.

What did we see on a live product page?

We opened the Salad Bowl page on Glyna, our public demo shop built on WooCommerce, on 6 November 2026 and measured where each part landed on a laptop screen and on a phone.

Two things stood out. First, there was no rating near the product name at all, on either screen. The page had one approved 5-star review, but a shopper looking at the name and price could not know that. Second, the reviews lived in a “Reviews (1)” tab next to the description, and that panel stays hidden until someone taps the tab. On the phone, the add to cart button already ended just below the bottom of the first screen; the reviews, once opened, started 1.2 screens down.

This is WooCommerce's standard product layout, and it is not broken; the reviews are there and the tab label shows the count. But it asks the shopper to go looking. The fix is the two-part layout above: a star line under the name that links to the reviews, and on phones an open reviews section instead of a tab.

How many reviews should a product page show?

Show about six at first, then a “Show more” button that loads the next six. Six is a comfortable scroll on a phone, and it keeps the page short for the many shoppers who read two or three and decide. Loading fifty at once makes the page long and slow and buries the footer, the shipping details and the related products under text few people read.

Show the newest first. A recent review about the current version of a product is worth more than a glowing one from two years and two suppliers ago, and newest-first is an order nobody can accuse you of arranging.

Once you have five or more reviews, add the summary that lets shoppers do their own sorting: a bar for each star value that filters the list when tapped, and a sort menu with lowest first. People who want to see the worst reviews will look for them anyway. Making them easy to find shows you are not hiding anything, and it is the honest version of “pinning” a favourite review, which can slide into showing only the flattering ones. The FTC's rule on reviews forbids presenting the reviews you show as most or all of them while you hold some back for their low ratings, as our article on the FTC fake reviews rule explains.

Ordering is where this gets subtle. The FTC's questions-and-answers page on the rule, read on 7 November 2026, says "organizing reviews is not suppressing reviews", but that organising them "in a way that makes it difficult for consumers to know about or find negative reviews" could break the FTC Act. UK law is blunter: the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 lists "giving greater prominence to positive consumer reviews over negative ones" as publishing reviews in a misleading way. A pinned 5-star review above a list sorted newest first, with a lowest-first option one tap away, is easy to defend. A page that opens on a hand-picked set of five-star reviews and hides the rest behind "Show more" is not.

Quoting one review next to a claim in the description, such as a line about fit under the size guide, is fine on the same terms: it is a real review, and the full list with the bad ones is still on the page.

For what the average itself means, and why “4.8 from 5 reviews” is a fragile number, see average star rating. If you would rather show reviews in a sideways row, our guide to review carousels covers how many cards to show at once.

Product reviews or shop reviews on the product page?

Product reviews, about that product. A review that says "fast delivery, nice people" belongs to your shop as a whole; a review that says the salad bowl chipped in the dishwasher belongs on the salad bowl. Shoppers on a product page want the second kind, and Google wants it too if you hope for stars in search.

Google's guidelines for review snippets, read on 7 November 2026, say to "provide review information about a specific item, not about a category or a list of items", that the reviews you mark up must be "readily available to users from the marked-up page", and that ratings "must be sourced directly from users", without aggregating reviews from other websites. So a product page that shows store-wide reviews, or ratings copied from a marketplace, is not one where Google will show your stars. If you also want your shop reviews somewhere, the home page or a reviews page is the place.

What else helps shoppers read the reviews?

Once the basics are in place, a few extras answer questions the stars cannot.

• Customer photos and videos show colour, size and wear in real light. Keep them inside each review and let shoppers filter to the reviews that have one, rather than moving them to a separate gallery that loses the text.
• A "Verified buyer" label on reviews you can tie to an order lets shoppers tell them from reviews you cannot match to a purchase.
• For clothes or shoes, a short fit question such as "runs small, true to size, runs large", asked with each review and averaged above the list, says more than the stars.
• A "Helpful" button with a most-helpful sort lets the detailed reviews rise when a shopper asks for that, without you doing the choosing.
• A summary of what reviewers say can save a long scroll, as long as it is labelled as a summary, has no stars of its own and never looks like a review.

Each one adds height to the page, so add them for products where shoppers actually have the question. A summary on a product with three reviews summarises nothing.

Will a reviews widget slow down the product page?

It should not delay anything the shopper needs first. A review widget that loads with defer runs after the page itself is ready, and the review data is small. On Glyna, Formgong's widget script was about 28 KB compressed and the reviews for the Salad Bowl came back as 234 bytes of data. On five phone-sized loads in a row, the reviews arrived between 29 and 293 milliseconds after the script had loaded; on four of those five the data came straight from the browser's cache.

Keep the reviews section below the add to cart button and nothing important moves while it loads. If you put a big review block above the button, reserve its height so the button does not jump as reviews appear.

How do you place reviews with Formgong?

On Shopify, Formgong's theme blocks give you both parts: a Star rating block you can drop under the product title in the theme editor, and a Product reviews block for the full list further down. Our guide on how to show reviews on Shopify walks through adding them.

On any other site, paste a div where the list should go and a span with the product's key under the title for the star line; one script fills both. The list shows 6 reviews by default (you can set up to 50), newest first, with Show more below. From five approved reviews it adds the star bars, the filters and the sort menu. With no reviews yet it shows only the Write a review link, if you turned that on.

The extras above are options you turn on, not defaults: customer photos and videos with a "With photos" filter, the "Verified buyer" label on reviews tied to an order, questions such as fit with their averages above the list, a "Helpful" button with a "Most helpful" sort, and an AI summary shown in its own box, labelled "AI summary of N approved reviews", with no stars and no author. Reviews imported from a marketplace such as Etsy appear in their own labelled list and stay out of the count, the average and the product's markup, which keeps to Google's rule against aggregating ratings from other sites.

On WooCommerce, the Formgong plugin puts the reviews in the product's Reviews tab, as on Glyna, and adds stars under product names in shop lists. It does not add a star line next to the title on the product page itself, so if you want one there, place the star span in your theme or with a custom HTML block. The review widget docs list every option.

Where do your reviews sit?

If you have moved reviews on your product pages and seen a change, or your theme makes the layout above hard, tell us at support@formgong.com. We would like to know what got in the way.