Refreshing Collections with New Reviews

WP Business Reviews allows you to add new reviews to your Collections either manually or automatically. This article explains how to do that for your Collections.

Many of the social platforms that are supported in WP Business Reviews have limitations on how many reviews they send over their API at a time. Facebook sends 24 at a time, Google and Zomato send 5, and Yelp sends only 3 reviews. Additionally, the order in which they send those reviews often means that you are not getting the newest reviews. These limitations can be frustrating for users who want and need many more reviews on their website.

WP Business Reviews tackles this problem by providing a way for users to call the platform API again and compare what reviews you already have against the newly available reviews and add only the unique reviews to your Collections. You can do this either manually, or you can check on regular intervals.

Manually Refreshing Reviews

If you have a Collection of Google reviews for your local ice cream shop, you can go into the Collection edit screen, and directly under the “Review Source” you’ll see a button that says “Refresh Reviews.” See here how that works:

A Collection of Reviews is manually refreshed with one new review.

If there are no new reviews available over the API then you’ll get an alert to that effect as well.

The “No New Reviews” message after attempting a manual refresh.

Automatically Refresh Reviews

Manually refreshing reviews is convenient, but you don’t want to have to do that for every Collection you have. For that purpose, you can enable auto-refreshing of all your Collections on a regular interval.

To enable auto-refreshing reviews, navigate in your WordPress Admin to “Reviews > Settings” and the “Advanced” tab. There you’ll see a setting called “Automatic Refresh.” You can set that to “Disabled,” “Daily,” or “Weekly” depending on how often your business receives new reviews.

The auto-refreshing reviews setting in the Advanced settings tab.

Technically, this is creating what’s called a “cron job,” using WordPress’ built-in wp_cron functionality. For developers who want to see this or test it, we recommend using the free “WP Crontrol” plugin.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does this affect Tagged Collections?: Refreshing reviews does not affect Tagged Collections in any way. Tags have to be added to single reviews manually, and therefore bringing in new reviews does not impact the tagged collection.
What if the automatic refreshing is bringing in 1-star reviews or bad recommendations?: All new reviews will be brought into your website and single reviews will be created regardless of their rating. But the filtering and settings you've set on your Collections will still be respected, so if your Collection is excluding all 3-star reviews and lower, and you bring in 2 new 3-star reviews they will be created as single Reviews, but they will not appear in your Collection because of the filtering settings you've set.
Does this work for all platforms?: Yes, all platforms that we support also support both manual and auto-refreshing reviews.
I hit the "Refresh Reviews" button and it said I have no new reviews, but I see new reviews on Google (or Facebook, Yelp, etc).: This most likely is happening because while you have new reviews, that new review is not yet offered over the API of the platform. Each platform has its own unique sort order of which reviews they serve over the API. You'll have to wait until those new reviews are added into the sort order of that platform.