Google Reviews

Google Reviews allows you to display business profiles and reviews for one or many companies on your website or blog.

How to Connect to Google

In order for the plugin to access your Google reviews, you must create a Google Places API key by following the steps in this tutorial video.

Features of the Google Places API

Google only allows serving reviews via the Google Places API. That necessarily means there are some limitations. Keep in mind the following:

  • Google only serves 5 reviews total over their API.
  • The order they provide those 5 reviews is fixed and is custom according to what Google considers to be the “Most Relevant” to your business.
  • Google limits the number of requests to the Places API before you start to need to pay for access. This will not impact 99.9% of all WP Business Reviews users because calls to the API are only done manually during the Collection creation process, and the current limits are 150,000/day by default. You can review your API project’s quota here.

Keep in mind that you can use manual or auto-refreshing of reviews to add new reviews from your Google Places using our auto-refresh feature.

Adding Single Google Reviews

The Reviews that you don’t get over the API, you can add manually as Single Reviews.

Troubleshooting

If the Platform Status does not read “Connected” after entering your API key, additional steps may be required to establish a connection.

Billing Not Enabled

As of July 16th, 2018, Google requires users to enable billing before accessing the Google Places API to retrieve their reviews.

Enabling billing on the Google Cloud Platform should not result in any actual charges since regular use of the plugin falls under the free usage quota. Even so, enabling billing is required in order to reliably access your reviews over time.

To enable billing, follow the steps below:

  1. Visit the Google Cloud Platform Billing page.
  2. Select the project in which you created the API key.
  3. Click “Create Billing Account.”
  4. Enable billing by completing the Google Cloud Platform registration form.
  5. After completion, return to WP Business Reviews Settings and re-save your API key.
  6. Confirm that the Platform Status field now reads “Connected.”

NOTE: Existing Billing Accounts Must Still Be Applied to Projects
If you already have a billing account enabled on a different Google project, you will still need to apply that billing account to the project in which the API key was generated for WP Business Reviews.

Restricted Key Detected

The most common reason for this error is that an existing Google Places API Key was entered with HTTP referrer restrictions enabled. In order to access your reviews, you must either create a new key without restrictions or change the restriction type.

Creating a New API Key – The easiest way to resolve this error is to create a new Google Places API key by following the instructions in the tutorial video.

Changing Restriction Type from HTTP Referrer to IP Address – If you wish to continue restricting access to your API key, then you will have to follow Google’s documentation to change the restriction type from HTTP referrer to an IP address restriction. Note that it may take several minutes after changing the restriction type for the changes to be reflected in the plugin settings.