How to allow your visitors to rate your website

GD Rating System allows ratings for various rating entities and types including posts, terms, users… But, you can add new entities and types to use for various other purposes and rate your custom items.

This user guide will show you how to allow your visitors and users to rate your website.

Rating Type for Website

To do that, we need to create new rating type for website. To do that, open the plugin panel, and Rating Types page. This page shows all the registered entities and types. One of the entities is called Custom. Click the Edit button for that entity, and you will get new screen where you can add new rating type for website. Initially, Types list is empty, so click the Add New Type button, and enter information for new type. This will look like this:

Now, to define the rating item (i.e., your Website) you need the ID. This can be any number, because you have only one item to rate (the website), so it is best to stick with the number 1. If you are using multisite, you can implement this for each website in the network, and in that case, it is best to use actual blog_id on each website. Or, you can use any other number you want, but make sure to always use that number when you want to display the website rating.

Optional Rating Page

Now, you can create a simple WordPress page where you can add some information about the reasons for the rating, and where you can display the rating block (for instance, using shortcode). This is optional, and you don’t need to do that at all. You can add website rating block anywhere you want.

For the purpose of this user guide, let’s create the page called Rate the website, and insert the shortcode into the page content.

For Lite/Free plugin

If you are using Lite/Free plugin, the shortcode would be:

[gdrts_stars_rating type="custom.website" id="1" template="default" style_type="font" style_font_name="heart" style_size="40" /]

For Pro plugin

If you are using Pro plugin, you can use a fancy rating block called IMDb, the shortcode would be:

[gdrts_stars_rating type="custom.website" id="1" distribution="normalized" template="imdb" style_type="font" style_font_name="heart" style_size="40" /]

And it will generate this:

A Rating Widget

To add website rating into sidebar, you can use the widget Stars Rating Block. Set the widget content like this:

Make sure to set it to Custom item, and select the Website for Type, with the ID set to 1. Set the Display page anyway you want, and also modify the Extra tab to add the link to the page we previously created by adding the link into the After field (it can include HTML):

Our widget will look like this:

And more

And you visitors will be able to vote through the rating page or the rating widget.

This user guide uses Stars Rating method, but, you can use any other method for this purpose. You can experiment with widget styling, rating page and more. You can also create the Settings Rule for the Custom/Website rating type and Stars Rating method to style it differently from other Stars Rating used elsewhere.