How to embed Google reviews on your website: 3 setups and their page-weight cost

Google reviews are public and tied to a Google account. Shoppers read them before they trust a new store. Putting them on your own site saves the shopper a trip to Google Maps. The question is how much each setup slows your page.

Setup 1: Google's own tools

Google has no "embed my review feed" button. It offers three things you can build with.

• A Maps embed. An iframe of your place on Google Maps. It shows your star rating and review count. Shoppers click through to read reviews on Google.
• The Places UI Kit. A Place Details element that draws a place's details, reviews included. Google bills per Place Details request.
• The Places API. The Place Details endpoint returns up to five reviews. You render them yourself.

For the API, create a Google Cloud project, enable the Places API and make a key. Then call Place Details with your Place ID. Keep the key on your server. Google picks which five reviews come back, and you cannot page through the rest.

Setup 2: a third-party widget script

Most review widgets work the same way. You paste one script tag into your theme. On each visit, the script loads, fetches your reviews and draws them. That adds the vendor's script, styles, fonts and reviewer photos to the page.

Two things decide the cost. One is how much loads before the shopper scrolls to the reviews. The other is whether the reviews push other content down when they appear. Ask the vendor both, then measure.

Setup 3: a cached feed

Here reviews are fetched ahead of time and stored. A page view reads the stored copy. You can draw it as plain HTML on your server. No review script runs in the browser.

Check the rules first. Google's Maps Platform terms let you cache Place IDs, and coordinates for up to 30 days. They do not list review text. Read the terms before you store Places API reviews.

Idukki sits in this group. Its widget reads reviews from Idukki's cache. A page view makes no call to Google. The widget itself is a script. Its core weighs 79 KB gzipped, by our own measurement. That one figure is ours. Measure the rest on your own page.

How to measure the page-weight cost

We have not published a measured comparison of these setups. Results depend on your theme, so measure on your own page. Here is the method we use.

A setup that loads below the fold may barely move LCP. It can still add kilobytes and blocking time. Record all five. Our widget speed tool runs a similar check. Core Web Vitals and UGC widgets explains each metric.

Will embedded Google reviews earn stars in search?

No. Since September 2019, Google calls these reviews self-serving. It shows no review stars for them. This covers LocalBusiness and Organization markup. It applies whether you add the markup or a widget does.

Do not relabel Google business reviews as product reviews to get stars. They review your store. Product review stars need reviews of that product. The schema guide for ecommerce covers product markup.

Should you show only 4 and 5 star reviews?

You can filter by star rating. Show your overall average next to the filtered list. Then shoppers see the full picture, and the feed is honest about what it hides.

A shopper who checks Google will still see the reviews you hid. Reply to the critical ones on Google, where every shopper can read the reply.

Where to put the reviews

On the home page, store-wide reviews build first trust. On a product page, reviews that mention the product answer a specific doubt. Near checkout, short reviews about delivery and returns help most. Google reviews as shoppable content covers matching reviews to products.

Running Shopify? How to embed Google reviews on Shopify covers theme app blocks step by step.