Review Chaser

The WordPress plugin

Review Chaser gives you two ways to put your live Google rating on your own site. One is a snippet that loads the reviews in a frame, which works anywhere. The other is this plugin, which renders them into the page as ordinary HTML, so they are part of your content and inherit your theme’s typography. On WordPress, the plugin is the better of the two.

Download

Version 1.1.030 KB

SHA-256 bde874a51fea13050c2b08942a024c1fe11780964dadedc5f0ac5a1578f5cb76

Check it before you install: shasum -a 256 the-file.zip. We are asking you to upload a zip into a server that runs your business; the least we can do is give you the number to check it against.

Installing it

  1. In WordPress, go to Plugins, Add New, Upload Plugin and choose the zip.
  2. Click Install Now, then Activate.
  3. Add the Review Chaser reviews block where you want them, or paste [review_chaser slug="your-page-name"] into any page. Your page name is shown in your Review Chaser settings.

Showing some reviews open and the rest folded away

Add visible="2" to open the first two and put the others behind a “read the others” toggle. Every review is still written into the page: the folded ones are inside a standard <details> element, so they are in the document, in the accessibility tree, findable by your browser’s find-on-page, crawlable, and openable with no JavaScript.

An earlier version had a limitattribute that cut the list short. We removed it. Showing three of Google’s five is not a layout preference, it is hiding two, and hiding reviews is the practice this product exists to refuse. A page saved with the old attribute keeps working and now folds those reviews away instead of dropping them.

Updates

The plugin is not on wordpress.org yet, so it checks our own version file and offers updates in the normal place on your Plugins screen. That check is a plain request for a static file. It sends the version it is running and nothing else: no site address, no domain, no email, no counter. We cannot tell one installation from another with it.

What it does to your site

What it touches, and what it does not

  • No access to $_GET, $_POST, $_COOKIE, $_SERVER or any visitor data.
  • No database writes other than cached copies of your own review feed. No custom tables, no options page, no user meta.
  • Outbound requests go to review-chaser.com and nowhere else: your review feed, and the update check. They carry your page name and the plugin version, and nothing else. No credentials, no site data, no visitor data. The Google API key stays on our server and never reaches your WordPress.
  • No admin screens, no settings page, no REST routes, no file writes, no eval, no third-party libraries.
  • No JavaScript, no web fonts, no images. Stars are text characters and the stylesheet is about a kilobyte, loaded only on pages that use it.
  • Nothing about your visitors is sent anywhere, and the update check carries no identifier, so we cannot tell one site from another with it.

It never makes your page wait on us

The feed is cached in your own site. A page render serves the cached copy immediately and refreshes it in the background; it does not hold the page open while it talks to us. If Review Chaser is slow, or down, your page renders at its normal speed with the last copy it had. Only the very first render of a page after installing fetches while you wait, under a two second limit, and it renders nothing rather than stalling if that fails.

It never hides a review

Every review Google returns is written into your page. The visibleattribute controls how many are open to begin with; the rest sit inside a expandable section, still in the page, still findable by search and by the browser’s own find-on-page, and openable without JavaScript. There is no setting that removes one, and there is not going to be.

Changelog

1.1.0
Your page never waits on our server: the feed is served from your own cache and refreshed in the background. The stylesheet loads only on pages that use the plugin. The limit attribute is replaced by visible, which folds reviews away instead of dropping them. Updates now appear on your Plugins screen.
1.0.0
First release: the [review_chaser] shortcode and the block, rendering your live Google rating and reviews into the page.

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