# WooCommerce reviews not showing: how to fix it WooCommerce review or Reviews tab missing? Usually the review waits for approval, reviews are off for the store or product, or the template lost the tab. Author: Formgong team Published: 2026-10-19 Updated: 2026-10-22 Language: en Canonical: https://formgong.com/en/blog/woocommerce-reviews-not-showing/ Most often the review is waiting for approval: WordPress holds a comment from anyone without an earlier approved comment, and that setting is on by default. Approve it under Products, Reviews. If the Reviews tab itself is missing, check Enable product reviews in WooCommerce settings, the product's own Enable reviews box, and the Single Product template. If reviews and their photos vanished around November 2025, they lived in Judge.me, which sunset WooCommerce on 31 October 2025. ## What we saw on a fresh install *Figure: A product page whose Reviews tab says Reviews (0) and There are no reviews yet, right after a visitor submitted a review. WordPress answered the review form with a redirect to a moderation link, so the review was held.* WooCommerce stores reviews as WordPress comments on the product, so WordPress's comment settings decide when a review appears, and WooCommerce's settings decide whether the Reviews tab is there at all. We changed one setting at a time on a test product and fetched the page as a logged-out visitor after each change. Find your symptom here: WooCommerce reviews missing: symptom, cause, fix What you seeLikely causeFix A new review is missing, the tab says Reviews (0)The review is pendingProducts, Reviews, Approve No Reviews tab and no stars on any productEnable product reviews is offWooCommerce, Settings, Products No Reviews tab on one productEnable reviews is off on that productProduct data, Advanced Every new product starts without reviewsWordPress closes comments on new postsSettings, Discussion Stars and “1 customer review” under the title, no reviews belowThe template or a snippet removed the tabPut the Product Details block back Reviews show, but the form is goneVerified owners only, or registration requiredSee the section below Reviews show without starsEnable star rating on reviews is offWooCommerce, Settings, Products Reviews and their photos vanished around November 2025They lived in Judge.me, which left WooCommerceSee the Judge.me section below ## The review is waiting for approval WordPress's Discussion settings have a group called “Before a comment appears” with two boxes: “Comment must be manually approved” and “Comment author must have a previously approved comment”. WordPress's own docs explain the second one: a comment is posted only if the author's email matches an earlier approved comment, “otherwise, the comment is held for moderation.” That second box is ticked in a new WordPress install, and on our test site it held the very first review. The form sent the visitor back to the product with `?unapproved=1&moderation-hash=…` in the address. In that browser the page said “Your review is awaiting approval”. Everyone else saw “Reviews (0)” and “There are no reviews yet”. So the customer who wrote the review thinks it worked, and the shop owner sees nothing on the page. Open Products, Reviews in the WordPress admin. Pending reviews show a count next to the menu item; hover over the review and click Approve. As soon as we approved ours, the tab read “Reviews (1)” and the stars appeared under the product title. By WordPress's own description of that box, the next review from the same email address will not be held. If you want to read every review first, tick “Comment must be manually approved” instead and plan to check Products, Reviews regularly. ## Reviews are switched off for the whole store WooCommerce's docs put the main switch here: WooCommerce, Settings, Products, the Reviews section, “Enable product reviews”. With it unticked, our product page lost the Reviews tab, the stars under the title and the review form. The approved review also disappeared from the page and from the product's structured data. Nothing is deleted: when we ticked it again, the review came back. The same section has the other review options, which we come back to below: “Show “verified owner” label on customer reviews”, “Reviews can only be left by “verified owners””, “Enable star rating on reviews” and “Star ratings should be required, not optional”. ## Reviews are off for one product Each product has its own switch. WooCommerce's docs: “Edit the product, open Product data > Advanced, and use the Enable reviews setting.” With it off, our product lost the Reviews tab and the stars, like with the store setting. One difference: the approved review was still in the page's Product structured data, with its rating, so a crawler could see a review that visitors could not. If every new product starts with that box unticked, look at WordPress, not WooCommerce. In Settings, Discussion, “Allow people to submit comments on new posts” sets the starting state for new posts, and products count as posts here. We unticked it and created a new product draft the way the admin's Add new product screen does: the draft came out with reviews off. With the box ticked, the next draft had reviews on. Products you already have keep their own setting either way. ## Stars show, but the reviews are gone This one looks the strangest. Under the product title you see the stars and a “(1 customer review)” link, and below it there is no Reviews tab. The link points to `#reviews`, and nothing on the page has that id. On a block theme such as Twenty Twenty-Five, the tabs come from the Product Details block in the Single Product template. The stars under the title are a separate block, Product Rating. We saved a copy of the Single Product template without Product Details, the way the Site Editor saves an edited template, and got exactly this picture. Open Appearance, Editor, Templates, Single Product, and add the Product Details block back. WooCommerce also ships a separate Product Reviews block if you want the reviews outside the tabs. A theme or a code snippet can do the same thing on any theme. WooCommerce builds the tabs through the `woocommerce_product_tabs` filter, and a snippet that runs `unset( $tabs['reviews'] )` removes the tab. We added such a snippet as a must-use plugin and got the same page as with the edited template: stars and the review count under the title, no tab. Search your theme's `functions.php` and any code snippets plugin for `woocommerce_product_tabs`. ## Reviews show, but customers cannot leave one Two settings replace the review form with a message, while existing reviews stay visible. - “Reviews can only be left by “verified owners”” in WooCommerce. Our logged-out visitor saw “Only logged in customers who have purchased this product may leave a review.” A review sent straight to the form's address was refused with the same sentence on an error page. If your shop sells to guests, this setting means almost nobody can review. - “Users must be registered and logged in to comment” in WordPress's Discussion settings. The form turned into “You must be logged in to post a review.” If a customer says the form complains “Please rate the product.”, they sent a review without picking stars. That message comes from “Star ratings should be required, not optional”, which was on in our new install. If your shop has never had a review at all, our guide on [adding reviews to a website](/en/blog/add-reviews-to-website/) covers where reviews can come from. Most buyers only review when asked, so our guide on [WooCommerce review reminder emails](/en/blog/woocommerce-review-reminder-email/) shows how to ask after every order. ## Reviews show without stars With “Enable star rating on reviews” unticked, our reviews kept their text but lost the stars on each review, and the rating field vanished from the form. The product's average rating also left the structured data. The stars under the title did not go away on Twenty Twenty-Five: the Product Rating block kept showing 5.00 out of 5. So one page showed stars at the top and none in the reviews. If you turned ratings off on purpose, remove the Product Rating block from the template as well. ## Reviews and photos that vanished with Judge.me If your reviews disappeared in late 2025 together with their photos, none of the settings above will bring them back, because they were never WordPress comments. Judge.me sunset every non-Shopify platform in autumn 2025: its own notice lists 31 October 2025 as the WooCommerce sunsetting date, with data accessible until 19 November, after which “access to all Judge.me functionalities and data will be permanently removed.” When its widgets stopped, product pages fell back to native WooCommerce reviews, which for many stores meant none. The photos are the painful part. Native WooCommerce reviews are text and stars; photo and video reviews always came from the app and were stored by it. What survives is the CSV export Judge.me offered before the cutoff, and the notice warned that videos were not in it and had to be downloaded separately. If you have that export, both replacements below can take it. If you do not, the reviews are gone, and the lesson is worth keeping: pick a review tool you can export from, and export the day you decide to switch. WooCommerce stores rebuilding after the sunset mostly weigh two options. Customer Reviews for WooCommerce is the established plugin that keeps reviews in your own database. The other is Formgong Reviews through our free [WordPress plugin](https://wordpress.org/plugins/formgong/): the product page gets the star average, the approved reviews and a Write a review form, your Judge.me CSV imports directly (Yotpo, Loox and Shopify Product Reviews exports too), photo and video reviews work on the free plan, and the reviews live in a dashboard you can export from. Pro adds an AI summary per product and automatic translation that shows each review in the visitor's language with a “Show original” link. ## The same problems with Formgong Reviews Most of this page is about how WordPress stores reviews as comments, which our widget does not use. Here is how the same list looks with it on a WordPress site. The same problems with Formgong Reviews ProblemWith Formgong First review held for approvalSame idea, but in plain sight. A written review waits for your approval by default, and the dashboard lists it. You can let bare star ratings publish themselves, or publish everything right away. Reviews removed by the templateSame risk. Our widget is a div and a script tag in the page or template; a template edit that removes it removes the reviews. Verified owners onlyWith our WordPress plugin, a review left from the email after a completed order shows “Verified buyer”. A plain review link still takes anyone, which is why approval is on by default. Stars without reviewsThe widget draws the average, the count and the reviews together, from the same approved reviews. Formgong Reviews is the review tool we build. It works on any site where you can paste HTML: one div and one script tag, and approved reviews show as stars and cards. Pro adds an AI summary written from the approved reviews. Reviews come from a link you send customers, and old ones can come in from a Judge.me, Yotpo, Loox or Shopify Product Reviews export or a CSV. If your shop sends us its orders (our WordPress plugin does it for WooCommerce), reviews left from the email we send after an order are marked “Verified buyer”, and the publishing rules never look at the star rating. The [review widget page](/en/review-widget/) shows the code. The same account covers the rest of a small shop's site: contact forms that email you and post to Telegram, an [AI help chat](/en/#chat) that answers visitors from your own pages, and free [templates](/en/templates/) with the form already connected. ## Still missing? Which of these was it in your shop, or is your theme doing something else? Write to [support@formgong.com](mailto:support@formgong.com) and tell us what you see on the page. If it is a case we have not covered, we will check it and add it here. ## Frequently asked questions ### Why is my WooCommerce review not showing? It is probably waiting for approval. WordPress's Comment author must have a previously approved comment setting is on by default, so a first review from a new email is held. Approve it under Products, Reviews. ### Why is the Reviews tab missing in WooCommerce? Check Enable product reviews in WooCommerce, Settings, Products, then Enable reviews under Product data, Advanced on the product. On a block theme, also check that the Single Product template still has the Product Details block. ### Why do stars show but no reviews on my WooCommerce product page? The stars under the title are a separate block. If the Product Details block was removed from the template, or a snippet unsets the reviews tab, the stars stay and the reviews go. ### Why can't customers leave a review in WooCommerce? Reviews can only be left by verified owners limits reviews to logged-in buyers of that product, and WordPress's Users must be registered and logged in to comment requires an account. Both replace the form with a message. ### Did Judge.me stop working on WooCommerce? Yes. Judge.me's notice lists 31 October 2025 as its WooCommerce sunsetting date, with data accessible until 19 November 2025 and permanently removed after that. Photo reviews went with it, since native WooCommerce reviews are text and stars only. Reviews exported before the cutoff can be imported into a replacement such as Customer Reviews for WooCommerce or Formgong Reviews. ## Sources and documentation - [WooCommerce: Product Reviews](https://woocommerce.com/document/product-reviews/) - [Judge.me: Sunsetting on WooCommerce and other non-Shopify platforms](https://judge.me/help/en/articles/11868548-judge-me-sunsetting-on-woocommerce-square-squarespace-bigcommerce-duda-and-prestashop) - [WooCommerce: Configuring WooCommerce settings, Products](https://woocommerce.com/document/configuring-woocommerce-settings/products/) - [WordPress: Discussion Settings screen](https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/settings-discussion-screen/) - [WordPress](https://formgong.com/en/for/wordpress/) [Get a form key](https://formgong.com/en/#top)