Testimonial page design: a separate page, or a section above the form?

Does anyone open a testimonials page?

Think about who reaches it. To land on a testimonials page, a visitor has to pick that item from your menu, so they already wanted reassurance enough to go looking for it. Everyone else came to find out what you do, what it costs and how to book, and they meet your customers' words only if those words are on the way.

So put the quotes where those visitors already are. A separate page is still worth having as the full list, the place your section and your rating badge link to. It just should not be the only place your customers' words appear.

Where should the testimonial section go?

Right before the moment of decision, which on a service site is the contact or booking form. We read the home pages of the 27 website templates we publish on 6 November 2026. Twelve of them have a testimonials section, and in 11 of those 12 it sits two sections above the last section of the page, which holds the form. In the twelfth, Goldleaf, the quotes share that last section with the form. In 8 of the 12, a section about prices or fees comes earlier on the page.

The order is the same story each time. First what you do, then how it works and what it costs, then other customers saying it went well, then the answers to the last few questions, then the form. A visitor who has just read the price and is wondering whether you are worth it reads the quotes at the right moment.

On a product page the logic is the same, but the decision point is the buy button, so reviews of that product go near it. Our guide on showing reviews on your homepage covers the home page of a shop.

How many testimonials should the section show?

Between three and six. Our 12 templates show between 1 and 6 quotes each, 5 in the middle of the range, and none shows more than 6 on the home page.

Pick the number with the layout in mind. In our test, Formgong's grid fitted 3 cards per row in a 960-pixel column, so 3 or 6 fill whole rows. On a 375-pixel phone it showed one card per row, and five short reviews made a block 1,044 pixels tall, more than a whole phone screen. If most of your visitors are on phones, three is often enough on the home page, with a link to the rest.

What goes on each testimonial card?

The quote, the name and one short line that places the person: the service they had, their town, their company. Stars if you collect them, and the date. A photo helps only if it is the customer's own and they agreed to it. A stock photo beside a real quote suggests the person in it said those words.

Keep the quote short on the card. If a customer wrote a long paragraph, the sentence with the specific detail is the one to show, with the full text one click away. Our testimonial examples show what a strong quote has in it, and testimonial questions help you get those quotes in the first place.

What should the full testimonials page have?

The full page is for the visitor who wants more proof, so give them enough to check and a way to find people like themselves.

• One line at the top saying what the page is: “What customers said after a repair, newest first”. No paragraph about how much you value feedback.
• Groups or a filter by service, product or type of customer once you have more than a dozen, so a landlord can find other landlords. Formgong's widget can filter the list by an answer to a customer question, such as the service someone had.
• Every quote dated, newest first, with the lukewarm ones left in. A page of nothing but five stars makes a careful reader wonder which ones you removed.
• A mix of formats if you have them: mostly short quotes, a few videos, one longer story about a single customer.
• One button after the strongest quotes that leads to your form or booking page, so a convinced visitor does not have to find the menu again.
• Real text, not pictures of text. Screen readers and search engines can read words on the page; a screenshot of a review they can't.

Keep the design quiet. The quote should be the largest text on each card, the name and second line smaller, with enough space between cards that each one reads as a separate person. If you are a US clinic or dentist, get each patient's written authorization before their words go on any page; our article on testimonial questions explains why.

What does a testimonial section look like on a phone?

Longer than you expect. We built a plain test page with Formgong's widget in a grid, a carousel and a rating badge, fed by the 5 approved reviews of our demo shop Glyna, and measured it in Chromium at desktop width and at 375 by 812 pixels.

The number to notice is the 295 pixels on the phone. With five or more approved reviews, the widget puts the average, five rating bars and a sort menu above the first quote. On a reviews page that is what people want: they can see the spread and jump to the three-star reviews. On a home page, a third of the phone screen goes to the summary before anyone reads a word a customer wrote.

Two layouts get around it. A rating badge, 35 pixels tall, linking to your full reviews page takes almost no room. A carousel keeps the section to one row of cards, though the summary still sits above it and the phone shows one card at a time; our article on the review carousel covers when that works and when people skip it.

If a carousel moves by itself, give people a way to stop it. The W3C's accessibility guidelines, WCAG 2.2 success criterion 2.2.2, which we read on 7 November 2026, say that moving content that starts on its own, lasts more than five seconds and sits next to other content needs a way to pause, stop or hide it. Formgong's carousel does not move unless you add data-autoplay; with it, there is a Pause button, the row stops while the pointer or keyboard focus is on it, and it stays still for visitors who have asked their device for reduced motion.

Will a testimonials page show stars in Google?

Usually not, if the reviews are about your own business. Google's review snippet documentation, last updated 8 September 2026 and read on 7 November, says that when the business being reviewed controls the reviews about itself, its pages that use LocalBusiness or Organization structured data are not eligible for review stars, whether the reviews are in the page's own markup or come through an embedded widget. That rule names local businesses and organizations; reviews of a product you sell, marked up as a Product on its own page, are not covered by it.

The page still has search value as ordinary text. Customers describe your service in the words other people search with, such as the town, the problem and the type of job, so keep the quotes as text on the page and give the page a plain title such as “Customer reviews of Smith Plumbing”.

How do you know if the section works?

Count enquiries, not time on page. Note the date you add or move the section, then compare form submissions in the four weeks before and the four weeks after, at the same time of year if you can. A small business rarely has the traffic for a proper A/B test, so a before-and-after count is the realistic check, and one change at a time is what makes it mean anything.

Will a testimonial widget slow the page down?

Check the weight before you add one. On 6 November 2026, Formgong's widget script was 88,954 bytes, sent compressed as about 27,000, and kept by the browser for an hour; the review data for our five test reviews was 1,087 bytes. The script loads with defer, so it runs only after the browser has read the rest of the page's HTML. It also draws inside its own shadow root, which keeps your site's CSS from breaking the cards while still using your font and text colour.

Whatever tool you use, open your browser's developer tools, go to the Network tab, reload the page and filter by the widget's domain. You will see how many files it fetches and how big they are.

Building the section with Formgong

Paste one div and one script tag where the section should go; the testimonial widget page has the code. Set data-limit to the number of quotes you want, add data-layout="carousel" for one row, or use the rating badge with data-href pointing at your full reviews page. Until a review is approved the widget shows nothing, or only a Write a review link if you turned that on, so an empty section never fills with placeholders.

The widget has no setting to hide the average and rating bars. If you want quotes only, the same reviews are in a public JSON file you can draw yourself, as explained in our guide to adding reviews to a website.

Where do your testimonials sit?

If you have moved your testimonials around and seen a difference in enquiries, we would like to know where they ended up. Write to support@formgong.com.