Great plugin, support isn’t regular

The plugin isn’t abandoned. I don’t officially support the plugin on this forum, and the support ticketing system has changed a few times over the past year, so it’s possible we missed the ticket or were just busy. I don’t make any profit from the plugin, so it takes a backseat when I have other projects.

The website hasn’t been updated in a while, you are correct. It’s a free plugin, and it works.

Google doesn’t require image for the review snippet. Their validator says it is required, but it is not. Plenty of people receive star ratings in SERPs without them, and the test we did with including image didn’t change anything. It’s a recommendation, not a requirement. If it was a requirement, they wouldn’t accept the snippet and display it in SERPs.

That all being said, we do have plans to update it from the HTML markup format to ld+json format, which is less prone to issues with themes and such, and allows for easier customization on the website as the information being displayed doesn’t have to look weird to match the requirements of the HTML snippet. Don’t have a timeline on it yet, but we’re testing it out.

Hi Aaron, thanks for responding. If you’re taking the backseat, better not ot offer support even more so support tickets. You’ll save yourselves bad reviews about no support, ehm, like this one. ??

Or at least autorespond to every ticket with an info that things might or might not get looked at.

Aside from that, ok, I understand, although if google says Required>
image “A value for the image field is required.”

then I’d prefer a plugin does what google requires rather than what an isolated test proves or doesn’t prove.

I have hundreds of reviews of my site but all of them show as Error in google webmaster tools, reason being Image is required. None of them show in SERPs.

thanks,
Lukas

Yes, Google is weird about which sites they make eligible to show the stars in SERPs. If you do a search for “powered by wp customer reviews”, you will see that it’s maybe 30% of sites that show the stars. I haven’t found a reason either way what the magic sauce is.

In regards to providing an image, it’s a tough one. Do we provide a bogus image, or do we then require an image on every review-enabled post, or if the review-enabled post has a featured image (or image in content?), then we use that? There is some testing that needs to be done for that.

I’ll have to double-check the newer and easier-to-output ld+json review format with their validator to see if those also require an image or not.

ok, thanks for the info!

simplest would be a default thumb image (something neutral, gray, like the missing image thumb that’s used everywhere) and maybe expand by the featured image if provided.

Looking forward to the update!
Lukas

Version 3.2.0 now includes a -very- default 1×1 image for now. We’re looking at options for being able to specify the image yourself, but it’s difficult with people who have previously had the plugin installed to force a newly required field. Not impossible, just a pain. Try out 3.2.0 and all should now be well with the microdata output by the plugin.