A shopper opens your reviews page. They want to know what your 2-star reviews look like, because nine 5-star reviews and one 1-star feels different from “actually a few of these are 2 and the seller responded well.” So they click 2 stars in the filter. Now they see the critical reviews. They read them. They scroll back to 5 stars. They buy.
Filtering is the part of a reviews page that lets a shopper interrogate before they decide.
What visitors can filter by
- Star rating. A dropdown of 1 through 5. Pick one and the page filters to reviews at that rating. Pick “All” to clear.
- Source. Tabs at the top of the reviews list switch between product reviews, testimonials, Google reviews, and the unified view. The visitor can scope to one channel if that’s what they want to see.
Both filters work together: a visitor can ask “show me 4-star testimonials” or “show me all 1-star Google reviews” and the page narrows to that subset.
Why filtering matters
The shopper who only sees the 5-star reviews wonders what you’re hiding. The shopper who sees a mix and decides to read the 2-star reviews specifically is the shopper who’s making a real decision. Filtering doesn’t suppress; it gives visitors the same access you have in admin: see the slice you want.
Most review platforms hide their critical reviews behind “most helpful” sorting or pagination tricks. Trustie shows them with the rest and lets visitors filter explicitly. The result is more trust, not less.
When you don’t want filters
Sometimes you want the reviews page to feel like a feed: latest at the top, scroll, no controls. Pass show_filters="false" to the shortcode and the filter UI disappears. The reviews list renders as a feed in chronological order.
Why shops turn it on with Pro
Free covers filtering by star rating and source. Trustie Pro adds filtering by demographic field (if you collect age, size, skin type, or other fields on the submission form, visitors can filter to reviews from people in their cohort), photo-attached filtering (show only reviews with photos), and verified-purchase filtering (show only verified reviews).