How to Add Capterra Reviews to Your Website

Software buyers do not believe your website. They believe other buyers, which is why review sites exist and why a Capterra listing often gets read before your own product page does.

The useful part of that is that the reviews are unusually specific. Someone comparing your product against two others has written about onboarding, support response, the feature that turned out to be limited, and whether they would buy it again. That is a different kind of proof from a testimonial you collected yourself, and it is more convincing precisely because you did not collect it.

The obvious next step is to put it on your own site, where it can work on the visitors who never make it to a review site. This guide covers how to do that properly: claiming the profile, the display options, what you may reuse, where the proof belongs on the page, and how to keep it from going stale.

Start by Claiming the Profile

A listing can exist without you. Reviews accumulate on it whether or not anyone from your company has ever logged in, and the description on it may be years out of date.

Claiming it is the foundation for everything else, for four reasons:

• You can correct the product information. Category, description, integrations and pricing model on an unclaimed profile are often wrong in ways that cost you buyers who never contact you to check.
• You can respond to reviews. The single highest value action available on any review platform, and it is not available until the profile is yours.
• You get access to the vendor assets. Badges and embeddable review material are offered to claimed vendors. What is available changes over time, so the vendor dashboard is the honest source rather than any article, this one included.
• You can see what buyers actually say. Read your reviews in one sitting and you will find your positioning problems described more plainly than any internal document has managed.

Expect the claim to involve proving you work at the company, usually through a work email address. It is a short process and it unlocks everything in this guide.

Three Ways to Show the Reviews on Your Site

There is no public interface that streams reviews into your page, so the realistic options are these.

Most sites end up using two of the three. A badge in the footer or beside the pricing table does the reassurance job at a glance, and quoted reviews do the persuasion job at the point where a specific doubt arises.

Whichever you use, link back to the profile. It costs you nothing, it lets a sceptical buyer verify the quote, and a rating with nothing behind it invites exactly the doubt you were trying to remove.

What You May and May Not Reuse

Review content belongs to the platform and its reviewers, not to you, and the boundaries are simple enough to state.

• Quote accurately. Trimming for length is fine, and doing so must not change the meaning. Removing the word "almost" from a sentence is the sort of edit that ends a case study.
• Attribute properly. The reviewer's name or role as published, the platform, and a link. An unattributed quote is not proof of anything and reads as invented.
• Do not republish wholesale. A page that reproduces the entire review set is republishing someone else's content, and it also duplicates a page that already ranks better than yours will.
• Do not build your own collection of it. Scraping a review site is against its terms, and the output breaks whenever the site changes.
• Never fabricate. Obvious, and worth saying because invented reviews and inflated ratings are the fastest way to lose the trust the section exists to build.

The rule that covers all of it: show what a reviewer wrote, say who wrote it and where, and give the reader a way to check.

Where the Reviews Belong

Placement decides whether a review section does any work. The common mistake is treating proof as decoration and putting it in a strip at the bottom of the homepage, where it is seen by people who have already decided.

• The pricing page. The highest doubt page on any software site. A review beside the plan people hesitate over does more than the same review anywhere else.
• Feature pages, beside the claim. If the page says setup takes an afternoon, the review that says setup took an afternoon belongs next to it, not three sections later.
• Comparison and alternatives pages. Where a buyer is explicitly weighing you against someone else, third party proof is the only kind that counts.
• The signup or demo form. One short quote beside the form, addressing the fear that stops people submitting it, such as how long it takes to get value.
• Sales material. The same quotes belong in proposals and follow up emails, where they answer the questions a buyer is asking internally.

The organising idea is to map doubts rather than pages. Write down the four objections your sales conversations actually contain, find the review that answers each, and place them accordingly. That exercise usually takes an hour and outperforms any redesign of the testimonial section.

What a Software Buyer Is Doing on a Review Site

Understanding the journey changes which reviews you feature, so it is worth two minutes even though it is not a technical step.

A buyer rarely arrives at a review site to read about you. They arrive at a category page, looking for the shortlist of tools that solve their problem, and they meet you alongside four competitors with ratings beside each. The first job of your profile is to survive that comparison, and that is a positioning question rather than a review question: the wrong category or a vague description loses you buyers who never read a word about your product.

Once you are on the shortlist, the reading changes character. People go straight to the middling reviews. Not the five star ones, which they discount, and not the one star ones, which they assume are outliers. The three and four star reviews are where a buyer looks for the honest limitation, because what they are really trying to find out is what it is like six months in.

Two conclusions follow for your own website. First, the reviews worth featuring are the ones that describe a real trade off and buy anyway, because those are the ones your buyer is looking for and it is better that they find them on your page. Second, the objections named in your reviews are the objections your sales page should answer directly. A pattern in the criticism is free research, and ignoring it while quoting the praise on your homepage is a way of learning nothing from the same document twice.

Star Ratings in Search Results, and the Rule People Break

The question always comes up: can the stars show under your page in search results. The answer is more restrictive than most articles admit, and getting it wrong carries real risk.

Review markup is meant for reviews of something else, not for a business rating itself. Ratings you have collected about your own product, placed in structured data on your own page, are self serving in Google's terms and are not eligible for review rich results. The review snippet documentation states the requirements, and it is worth reading in full before adding any markup at all.

Two further rules catch people out. Marked up content must be visible on the page, so an average in structured data that a reader cannot see is a violation rather than an optimisation. And content injected after the page loads by a third party script may not be seen at all, so a widget that renders reviews client side is not a route to rich results even where they would otherwise be allowed.

The consequence for a normal software site is simple. Add reviews because they persuade the humans reading the page, which they demonstrably do, and do not add rating markup for your own product hoping for stars in the results. Manual actions for spammy structured data are real, they apply to the whole site rather than the offending page, and no plausible click through improvement is worth that exposure.

Choosing Which Reviews to Show

Assume a visitor reads one. Which one it is matters more than how many you have.

• Specific beats enthusiastic. "Support answered in ten minutes on a Sunday" is proof. "Great product, love it" is noise, however many stars are attached.
• Recognisable role beats big company name. A buyer identifies with someone doing their job at their size of business, and a household name from a different market reads as irrelevant.
• Recent beats glowing. A review from three years ago describes software that no longer exists. Dates should be visible, which also disciplines you into refreshing the selection.
• Objection answering beats general praise. The best review on your pricing page is one that mentions the price and says it was worth it.
• Balanced beats perfect. A four star review that names a real limitation and buys anyway is more persuasive than five five star reviews in a row, because it reads like a person.

Four to six well chosen quotes will outperform a carousel of twenty. If you have a large number of reviews, the number itself is the summary, and the individual quotes should be doing something more specific than adding to a total.

Getting More Reviews Without Buying Them

A section with three reviews in it advertises that you have three reviews. The supply problem is worth solving before the display problem is worth perfecting.

• Ask at the moment of success, not on a schedule. After a support ticket resolved well, after onboarding finished, after a renewal. The trigger matters more than the wording.
• Ask people, not lists. A request from the person a customer already deals with is answered. A generic broadcast is not.
• Make it one click. Link directly to the review form, not to the homepage of the review site.
• Ask a specific question. "What did this replace, and what changed" produces a usable review. "Please leave us a review" produces two sentences of nothing.
• Follow the platform's rules on incentives. Review sites have explicit policies, and gift card campaigns that break them get reviews removed and profiles flagged. Read the vendor guidance before running any campaign.
• Never filter who is asked. Asking only your happiest customers is a well known practice and it is exactly what erodes the credibility of the result. It also deprives you of the criticism that would have been useful.

We covered the general version of this in our guide on how to get more reviews, and most of it transfers to any platform.

Responding, Including to the Bad Ones

Responses are public and are read by buyers, not just by the reviewer, which makes them a marketing asset rather than a customer service chore.

Respond to everything for the first while. A profile where every review has a considered response tells a buyer that someone is home.

Answer the criticism directly. Acknowledge the specific problem, say what changed if something did, and stop. Defensive responses damage you far more than the review they were answering.

Do not argue about facts in public. If a review is factually wrong, correct it briefly and offer to continue privately. A long public rebuttal reads as a warning about what working with you is like.

Thank people for specifics, not for the stars. A response that engages with what the reviewer actually said is worth writing, and a template is worse than silence.

The broader case for this, and for treating reviews as a channel rather than an outcome, is covered in responding to online reviews.

Keeping the Section Current

A proof section decays quietly, and the decay is invisible to you because you stop reading your own website.

• Refresh the quotes twice a year. Enough to keep dates recent, rare enough not to become a chore.
• Check the rating you display still matches the profile. A hard coded average drifts, and an average on your site that is higher than the one on the profile is worse than showing none at all.
• Remove reviews about features that changed. Praise for an interface you have since replaced confuses more than it convinces.
• Check the link still resolves. Profile URLs change when categories are reorganised, and a proof section linking to a dead page undoes its own work.
• Watch what new reviews say. A pattern in recent criticism is product feedback arriving free of charge, and it is usually about onboarding or support rather than features.

Reviews From More Than One Place

Most software companies collect reviews on several platforms, and the site then has to decide what to show.

The temptation is to show all of them, which produces a wall of logos and ratings that a visitor reads as noise. The better pattern is one primary source displayed properly, with the others reduced to a line of small badges. Which one is primary depends on where your buyers actually look, and that is a question your sales team can answer in a minute.

The exception is a comparison page, where showing that you rate well across several independent sources is exactly the argument being made. There, a small table of ratings by platform is more persuasive than any single quote.

If you do want to combine sources into one section, do it with a tool built for it rather than by hand, so the ratings update together and the styling stays consistent. Our roundup of all in one review widgets covers the options, and the wider argument for why third party proof outperforms your own copy is in the role of reviews in building trust.

Problems and Their Fixes

• The badge does not render. Usually a script pasted into a field that strips scripts. Use a code or HTML block, or an image based badge instead.
• The rating on your site is out of date. Anything hard coded will be. Either display it from a source that updates, or check it on a calendar.
• The section pushed your page speed down. Third party badges load third party scripts. One is fine, five is a performance problem, and an image with a link is often the same result for none of the cost.
• Quotes look invented. Almost always missing attribution or missing dates. Add both, and prefer a role and company type over a bare first name.
• The reviews are all old. A display problem hiding a supply problem. Fix the asking, not the layout.
• Your profile link 404s. Check it after any category change on the platform, and again whenever you redesign the section.
• The section looks the same on every page. Then it is decoration. Different pages answer different doubts, and the same three quotes everywhere is a sign nobody chose them for the page they are on.
• Nobody internally knows who owns it. The most common failure of all. Reviews sit between marketing, support and product, which usually means they sit with nobody. Name one person, even for an hour a quarter.

Two habits prevent most of the list. Read your own proof section as a stranger once a quarter, on a phone, and click every link in it. And keep the number of third party scripts on a commercial page to the minimum that does the job, since the page that persuades slowly persuades less.

Measuring Whether It Changed Anything

Proof sections are added on faith and rarely checked, which is a shame because they are unusually easy to test.

The cleanest test is the pricing page, since it has a clear next step. Add the review beside the plan, leave everything else alone, and compare the rate at which visitors continue over a period long enough to mean something. If your traffic is too small for that to be reliable, a simpler signal works: ask your sales team whether prospects have started referencing the reviews, because that is what a working proof section produces.

Be careful about the temptation to measure it by clicks on the review link. Almost nobody clicks through, and that is not failure. The section did its job the moment it removed a doubt, which is invisible in analytics and visible in conversion.

What to change if it is not working is usually the choice of review rather than the design of the box. Swap a general five star quote for one that names the objection your sales calls keep hitting, and test again.

Getting Started

The short path. Claim the profile and correct what is wrong on it. Read every review you have and write down the four objections they answer. Put one review beside each of those four moments on your site, with the reviewer's role, the date and a link back to the profile. Add a badge with the overall rating on the pricing page. Then set a reminder for six months to refresh the quotes.

If you would rather not build and maintain the display yourself, a Capterra reviews widget handles the layout, the rating and the styling, so the only ongoing job is the one that matters, which is having reviews worth showing.

Most companies collect reviews in more than one place. The same display principles apply to Google Play reviews for an app, and if you are also short of reviews rather than short of ways to show them, getting Facebook reviews covers the asking side.