Desk9 Reviews for Google

Yes. You need a Google Places API key from a Google Cloud project with billing enabled and the Places API (New) turned on. There is no OAuth, no Client Secret and no manual Business Profile approval to wait for. Restrict the key by your server’s IP address for security.

The Google Places API returns up to five of the most relevant recent reviews per business. The plugin caches and displays those. If you need all of your reviews you would need the OAuth-based Business Profile API, which this plugin intentionally no longer uses.

Any public Google business listing works — you do not have to own or manage it, and you do not have to verify anything with Google. You just search for it by name and connect it.

No. The plugin shows the real reviews Google returns, exactly as they were written. You can never edit a review, rewrite it, or filter reviews by rating.

The one place where you choose a single review is the Quote Spotlight layout, which by design puts one review on stage — there you decide whether that is the best, the newest, the longest, or a specific position. Every layout that shows several reviews always shows them in Google’s own order, newest first.

By default the most convincing one: the longest text among the highest-rated reviews. In the block you can switch this to the newest review, the longest, or a fixed position. Google rotates which reviews its API returns, so if a chosen position no longer exists the layout falls back to the best review instead of rendering nothing.

No. The frontend only reads a small local cache. All Google API calls happen on the server during setup and scheduled synchronization.

Only if you explicitly enable them. When enabled, images may load from a Google domain when a page is viewed.

Yes. Five layouts can be pinned to the screen instead of sitting in the content:

• Rating bar and Notification bar span the full width at the top or the bottom, like a classic notification bar.
• Badge , Freshly reviewed and Sticky pill sit in a corner — bottom left, bottom center, bottom right, or the same three at the top.

Choose the placement in the block under “Placement”, or with the shortcode:

[rdgfg_rating_display layout="notice" float="top" dismissible="1"] [rdgfg_rating_display layout="badge" float="bottom-left" dismissible="1"]

Turn on “Let visitors close it” to add a small ×. A closed element stays closed for the rest of the visit. How far it sits from the screen edge, and whether a dismissal is remembered, are set once under Display & Styling.

Yes. The inline layout renders as inline text, so you can paste the shortcode straight into a paragraph:

Over 120 guests have rated us — [rdgfg_rating_display layout="inline" size="l" show_cta="0" show_maps_link="0"] — and we are grateful for every one. size="l" spells the count out ("128 reviews"); `size="m"` shortens it to

“(128)” so it stays compact inside a sentence, and size="xs" shows only the value and one star, for use next to a button. show_cta="0" and show_maps_link=”0″ drop the button and the Google link, which are on by default.

Yes. Choose the “Inline Text” layout — it renders “4.9 ★★★★★ 80 reviews” as plain text with star characters, so you can drop it into a sentence, a heading or a hero section. Use [rdgfg_rating_display layout="inline"] or pick Inline Text in the block. The size attribute goes from xl down to xs , where xs renders a single star plus the value — ideal right next to a call-to-action.

Instead of an empty box or a 0.0-star badge, the plugin shows a short “no reviews yet” card with a link to write the first one. As soon as Google returns reviews, the layout you picked takes over.

Yes. Pick one of the five presets, or switch the preset to “Custom” to unlock every individual colour, border, radius and shadow under Display & Styling. There is deliberately no free-text CSS field — every option is a structured control, which keeps the output safe and predictable.

Yes. The whole interface is translation-ready; translations come from translate.wordpress.org, and the included .pot template lets you add your own. The block and shortcode render dynamically, so the same latest reviews appear correctly on every language version of a page. Ratings and dates follow each language’s locale (e.g. “4.7” in English, “4,7” in German). Review text itself is shown in the language the customer wrote it — it is not machine-translated, so your real Google reviews stay authentic.