Most review plugins are good at one thing. A testimonials plugin shows your testimonials. A Google reviews plugin shows your Google reviews. A WooCommerce reviews plugin shows your product reviews. Each shows a number that only counts what it tracks.
A shopper looking at your site and thinking “what’s their actual rating” gets three numbers and no way to combine them.
Trustie’s aggregate is one number. It’s calculated from everything.
What goes into it
- Product reviews (in WordPress comments with
comment_type = 'review'). - Testimonials (in your testimonial CPT, whether Trustie’s own or an external one you’ve mapped).
- Google reviews (via the Places API).
- Site reviews (reviews about the shop overall, not a specific product).
Each source contributes its own count and average. Trustie weights them by count and produces a single rating. The reviews page shows it, the floating widget shows it, the rich-snippets schema sends it to search engines, and any shortcode that displays the average pulls from the same source.
What shoppers see
A single rating with a real review count behind it. “4.8 stars from 142 reviews” reads as one shop with strong feedback, not “this section has 4.7, this section has 4.9, the homepage has 4.8 because we hand-curated.” Trustie’s number is the answer to “what do customers think of this shop”, computed once and applied everywhere it’s shown.
Why this matters more than people think
The number is the trust signal. A shopper deciding whether to buy in the next ninety seconds doesn’t read individual reviews until they’ve decided your overall rating is worth the time. If your testimonials page shows 4.8 but your product page shows 4.2 because product reviews include the angry customer whose order arrived broken, the shopper sees the lower number first and weights it more heavily.
One aggregate, computed across every source, means no confusing inconsistency. The rich-snippet schema sends the same number to Google search. Your search-result stars match your homepage stars match your reviews-page stars.
Why shops turn it on with Pro
Free’s aggregate counts what you have: testimonials, product reviews, and Google reviews via the Places API (capped at 5 by Google’s API, not by Trustie). Trustie Pro extends the source pool. Pro adds Trustpilot reviews to the aggregate (if you’re syndicating those), event reviews (post-event review requests via Eventin or The Events Calendar), and the uncapped Google reviews path via the Business Profile API. The aggregate logic doesn’t change; the number just becomes more representative as more sources contribute.