On June 15th we celebrated a major milestone in the evolution of the Yotpo product by rolling out our new reviews widget to all existing users. All Yotpo users who signed up before June 15th can now upgrade to the new widget in a matter of minutes. Just log into your Yotpo account and go to Tools > On Site > New Reviews Widget and click the “Upgrade” button.
Building the new widget was a momentous task which involved our entire R&D, support, and product teams. We started the process many months ago and worked very closely with a small, dedicated group of beta testers (you guys rock) who helped us mold the new widget into what you see today. This guide covers all the main aspects of using the new widget from the new and improved layout and design options, to how users can now promote popular products right from within the widget. At the bottom of this guide you will find a detailed FAQ section.
Before we jump into the details lets take a look at an example:
To see the reviews widget shown above on the actual site, then visit our friends over at Strobepro.com.
A slicker, more up-to-date design
As you can see in the example above, our new widget has a brand new, fresh design which does a better job of driving your visitors’ eyes to your reviews. The new widget still shows the reviewer’s name, the star rating of the review and whether the reviewer is a verified buyer, verified reviewer or an anonymous reviewer. One cool addition to the new widget is the option for visitors to share their favorite reviews to their social networks. This feature goes hand-in-hand with our Comments feature, because after you comment on a specific review, we email the reviewer and they can then share their review and the comment to their online social circle.
We’ve made customizing the new widget to fit the look & feel of your store even easier. All you need to do is pick a core color and we then use that core color to make the other elements within the widget match. The result is amazing, and Yotpo users with the new widget absolutely love its new look. Below is a screenshot of the “look & feel” options for the new widget. The new widget is both mobile and tablet friendly.
CSS Editor
The CSS editor was built to help users have complete control over the look of their reviews widget. The feature is for technically orientated users with knowledge of CSS or those who have a developer who can customize the CSS for them. In order to have access to the CSS editor, you will need to contact our support team our your account manager.
Performance and SEO improvements
The New Reviews Widget has a number of performance and SEO improvements. In order to dramatically improve performance, our R&D team made three main changes to the way the widget is rendered on a user’s site. The first change was in dropping the number of server calls from 80-90 to just 3. We are now able to load the entire widget with only 3 server calls by re-designing the widget entirely without any images. The whole widget is rendered from pure html, css and by using a number of web-friendly fonts. The second major change was in using a CDN for hosting both the resources of the widget and the actual reviews. This setup means that users’ web servers are more likely to be closer to the Yotpo resources and that if one server cluster is down, the widget can still be loaded from a different server cluster. The third and final change was in developing the widget so that it would load in the back-end and not within the browser. All these changes have dropped the loading time from 5-6 seconds on first load to 700 milliseconds on average. On second load, this number can be as low as 200 milliseconds.
The New Reviews Widget was developed in such a way that it is now possible to load the entire widget, including the reviews, at the server level of a store and there load the html of the reviews widget with the actual site. This process is needed in order for the crawlers to be able to crawl the actual reviews. Setting this up isn’t straight forward and requires an in-house developer. If you would like to learn more about this setup then please contact us.
Promoted products within the new Reviews Widget
One of the biggest changes with the reviews widget is the option for users to promote products from within the widget. The promoted products section of the new widget is great for leveraging the power of the star rating and the total number of reviews to drive visitors to specific products.
By default, we are displaying up to eight different products within the promoted products section with a scroller. These products can be chosen manually or you can let Yotpo choose them for you. The promoted products section is on by default but can be easily disabled within the reviews widget page in the Yotpo admin.
FAQ
1. Is upgrading to the new widget a complicated process?
Not at all, we worked hard to make sure that upgrading to the new widget will take just a few minutes and can be done by anyone, no matter how technically orientated you are. If you do get stuck and need help with upgrading to the new widget then please contact our support at support@yotpo.com.
2. After I upgrade to the new widget is it possible for me to rollback to the old widget?
Yes, if you signed up to Yotpo before 15 June you can downgrade to the old widget by clicking on the “downgrade to old widget” link within the new widget page in your admin. After clicking on the link you will be taken to the step-by-step guide to switch to the old widget.
3. Will all my existing reviews automatically appear in the new widget?
Yes, as soon as you are done changing the two code snippets as shown in the upgrade guide, all your existing reviews will appear in the new widget.
If you have any questions about the new widget or are struggling to upgrade, please contact our friendly support team via email at support@yotpo.com.
4. How can I suggest ideas to the Yotpo product team?
Please send all your ideas to us via our Feature Request Portal. We love hearing from you and we have developed a number of features based on users’ ideas.
5. I have the old widget. How can I upgrade?
It’s easy! Just log into your Yotpo account and go to Tools > On Site > New Reviews Widget and click the “Upgrade” button. If you need any help, just fill out this form to get assistance from our awesome Support team.
