Testimonial examples for business, and what makes one believable

Why do most testimonials get skipped?

You have probably seen a testimonials section like this one: three grey boxes, each with “Great service, very professional, would highly recommend!” and a first initial underneath. Nobody reads past the second box, because nothing in it could only have been said about this business. It could be about a dentist or a car wash, and for all the visitor knows, the owner typed it.

Adding more boxes like these won't help. You need quotes that could only be about you, and you mostly get those by asking better questions and showing more of what the customer actually said.

What makes a testimonial believable?

Read a few real ones that convinced you to book something, and they tend to share the same parts. Someone you can place, by name and by a short second line: the service they had, their town, their pet, their job. A specific moment, ideally with a number in it, such as forty minutes, a Saturday, a week's wait. Often a small flaw, mentioned and then put right. And a date, so you know it is not from five years and two owners ago.

You will not get all of these in every quote, and you should not try to. Two of them already lift a testimonial above the grey boxes.

Testimonial examples by type of business

We write website templates for small businesses, and each one ships with sample testimonials so the layout has something in it. Below are seven of them. We wrote them, the people are made up, and they are placeholders a business replaces with its own. We show them here because they were written to the rules above, so you can see the parts in place before you ask your own customers.

Look at what the Leak repair example does with its four stars. It says what went wrong, and that makes the praise next to it easier to believe. If your real testimonials are all five stars and all glowing, a careful reader starts to wonder which ones you left out.

What types of testimonials are there?

A testimonial is anything a customer says about you that you then show to other people: a quote, a review, a video, a post. The format changes what it can carry. Here are the common ones, each with a short example we made up for this article.

• A quote, one to three sentences on your site. “Ordered the linen sheets in sage on Monday, had them on the bed by Thursday. The colour is exactly what the photo shows.” (Mara, online shop customer)
• A review on Google, a review site or your own reviews widget, with stars and a date. You don't pick the words, which is why readers trust reviews more than quotes you chose.
• A video of a customer talking for a minute: who they are, what was wrong, what changed. It is harder to fake and much harder to get, so most small businesses have two or three, not twenty.
• A case study, a page about one client: the problem, what you did, the result with a number. Agencies and software companies use these because a buyer can forward them.
• An interview, written as questions and answers. It suits coaches and consultants, whose clients often say more when asked than when handed a blank box.
• A social post a customer wrote about you, shown as a screenshot or an embed. Ask before you copy it onto your site; a public post is not permission to use it in your marketing.
• An influencer post. If you gave the person anything, such as free products, money or a discount, the post and any place you reuse it have to say so clearly. The FTC's Endorsement Guides, 16 CFR 255.5, read on eCFR on 7 November 2026, count those as material connections.

A small business usually needs only the first two plus one longer story. The examples below are quotes, the format most websites start with.

Is there a template a customer can fill in?

Yes, and it helps people who freeze at a blank box. Send it as prompts, not as text to sign, because seven customers filling in the same sentence give you seven testimonials that sound alike. Pick the one that fits:

• For a service: “Before I called [business], [what was wrong]. [What happened on the day]. Since then, [what is different].”
• For a product: “I bought [product] because [reason]. When it arrived, [what you noticed]. After [how long], [how it has held up].”
• For a client project: “We needed [goal]. [Business] [what they did]. The result: [something you can count].”

Then publish what they wrote, not the template. If the answer comes back with the brackets' wording still in it, ask them to say it the way they would to a friend.

How do you fix a vague testimonial?

You can't rewrite it yourself, but you can ask one more question. Take this made-up example, the kind almost every business gets:

“Great service, very professional, would highly recommend!” (J.)

Write back and thank them, then ask what happened on the day: what was wrong when they called, and what was different afterwards. If they reply with something like the next quote (also made up), ask whether you may show the new version with their name and town:

“Our boiler died on a Friday night in January. They came the same evening and had the heating back on by nine.” (Jess M., Hollow Lane)

Most people are happy to say more once they know what you are after. Our guide to asking a client for a testimonial by email has the wording for the first request, and the article on testimonial questions lists questions that get a specific answer the first time.

Should a testimonial show a date?

Yes, if you can. When we counted the 54 sample testimonials in the 12 templates that have a testimonials section, read on 6 November 2026, 53 had a name, 53 had a second line such as a service or a town, 15 had stars, and none had the date the words were written. Three said “Member since” with a year, which is not the same thing. That is fine for placeholder text, which has no real date to show. It is a problem once the quotes are real, because the reader cannot tell a review from last month from one written before you changed staff, suppliers or prices.

A date also helps you. Testimonials age, and a section where the newest one is two years old tells a visitor that people stopped saying good things, even if they didn't.

Where should you use testimonials?

Where a visitor is deciding. On a service site that is just above the contact or booking form; on a shop, next to the buy button; on a pricing page, next to the price. A full testimonials page is useful as the place those sections link to. Our article on testimonial page design measures where the quotes sit in our templates and how much room they take on a phone.

Off the website, a quote works in a booking confirmation email, on a flyer, in a social post and in an ad. An ad has stricter rules than your own site, such as saying what results customers usually get; testimonial advertising goes through them.

Can you write testimonials for your customers?

No. The US FTC rule on fake reviews and testimonials, 16 CFR 465.2, read on eCFR on 6 November 2026, makes it unlawful for a business to write or create a testimonial that misrepresents that the person exists, that they used the product or service, or what their experience was. The FTC's Endorsement Guides, 16 CFR 255.1(b), add that when you put a customer's words in quotation marks, they have to be their exact words, and you may not reword them in a way that changes what they meant.

So the samples in the table above are for learning the shape, not for your website. Keep a customer's words as they wrote them, fix nothing but an obvious typo if they agree, and drop a quote the moment the customer asks you to.

Before you publish, ask the customer how they want their name shown and whether you may use a photo, and check the text for things they would not want public: a phone number, a street address, a health detail, the full name of a member of your staff or of someone else. Those you can leave out with their OK, since cutting them does not change what they think of you. Our article on the FTC fake reviews rule covers the rest of it.

How does Formgong show a testimonial?

Formgong collects testimonials with a short form on your site or a hosted review page, and nothing is public until it has been approved. The testimonial widget then shows each approved one with its stars, the customer's name, their text (up to 2,000 characters) and its date. If you reply in public, your reply sits under it. A review that came in through a review email after an order carries a Verified buyer label. On our demo shop Glyna, read on 6 November, each review in the public data has 8 fields, and the date is one of them, so you never have to add it by hand.

For the second line, you can add up to five customer questions with set answers, such as “Service: Emergency plumbing” or “Pet: Dog”, and the answer shows on the card. Every question is optional for the customer. The widget does not have a job title or company field, so for business clients the name field does that job. Ask them to type their name the way they want it shown, for example “Daniel Price, CTO, Atlas Rail”, and set Show reviewers' names as to Full name in the widget settings. New sites start with first name and last initial, which keeps privacy for shop customers but would turn that line into “Daniel R.”, the initial of the last word.

If you collect video, collecting video testimonials for free explains the limits. For product pages rather than services, see product review examples.

Which testimonial won you a customer?

If one quote on your site keeps coming up in sales calls, or a customer told you it was the reason they booked, we would like to hear what it said and why you think it worked. Write to support@formgong.com.