How to Create a Review Website with WordPress: A Comprehensive Guide

It’s very obvious that people search for reviews on the internet before buying any product. You can make good money by writing decent reviews of products and services that people use day to day.  For that, you need to create an appealing review website which is valuable for both users and search engines.

Skip the whole process and create a review website in less than 5 minutes with StarCat Reviews plugin.

What Is a Review Website?

A review website is where people go and read about things before buying anything. It has useful reviews about people, businesses, products, or services is posted so that people looking to find a solution online can find the best solutions.

Usually, they have ratings and reviews given by an editor followed by reviews and ratings of users. Every review website will be based on a specific niche market.

Why you should create a review website?

By giving excellent reviews, you can make a lot of money.

Wondering how? It is called Affiliate Marketing. Online stores give a part of their sales as a commission to you when you refer customers to their store.

Many stores have an affiliate program, and you need to find ones that suit you and join them. You will be given a referral code /link, and you have to post the link along with your review on your website. When people read your review and get convinced, will use your referral link and buy the products which in turn earn you commissions.

Affiliate commissions can be good earnings. Many people even have it as a primary source of income. When you get famous, you would be contacted for advertising by brands, and you get a name as ‘Influencer’.

Interesting right? If you are reading this article, undoubtedly have an interest in creating a review website aren’t you? Follow this article precisely and you will have an awesome review website on your hands.

Finding your Niche

Well, you can’t simply write about random things without any connections. You need to pick a specific niche market. Don’t need to overthink. Choose a niche in which you have good knowledge.

Write about the products which you use or have used. You can’t write excellent reviews on things which you haven’t used. Target a small market with lesser competition. It’s better that way. Try to be unique and don’t be a copycat.

Finding the best platform to create your review website

You need to find a website building platform which suits you best. Otherwise, you will be lost even before you begin. You need to find a beginner-friendly platform which is affordable and flexible so that anyone can launch a review website in just a few minutes.

I suggest you use WordPress. It is very beginner friendly and affordable. It has the best tools for creating a professional review website. So follow these instructions, and you will be amazed by what you can do with WordPress.

Getting Hosting and Domain

Someone needs to host your WordPress review website. You need to find a reliable and affordable WordPress hosting provider. We have solved it for you. Follow this article for getting hosting, domain and installing WordPress on your website.

Picking a Domain name

A proper domain name is essential for a review website. Come up with a catchy domain name which no one else uses which is related to your niche. For example, “Yelp” it rhymes with “Help”-  It’s catchy.

Finding the best WordPress review tool

If you have followed this guide so far, you have a fresh WordPress website on our hand, and you need to install the best tools for creating a review website.  There are many review tools in WordPress with varieties of features. It comes in the form of WordPress themes and plugins.

For our review website, we choose to use a WordPress review theme called Rehub. In this guide, we will build a WordPress review website with Rehub theme.

You can also check out our articles on Best WordPress Review Plugins and WordPress Rating Plugins for more options.

Reasons for choosing Rehub theme:

• There are 5 review post formats – regular post, video post, music post, review post, gallery post
• You can add a Review post anywhere with a shortcode.
• You can make separate Editor review and User review

• You can give Coupons, Deals, Pricing History which significantly influences the purchase decision of the readers.
• Content Egg and Affiliate Egg plugins could be integrated with this theme which gives it the best affiliate marketing features.
• Editing the layout of the website is comfortable with WP Bakery (Visual Composer) page builder.
• It can be integrated with WooCommerce plugin.

Buying the Rehub WordPress theme

Rehub is a premium WordPress theme, and so you have to buy it. There is no free version. The good thing is that the plugins which are to be used with this theme have free versions which are quite useful.

You can use this link to buy the Rehub theme from ThemeForest marketplace. You need to have an account (Envato account) to buy this theme if you have one sign in to buy. If you don’t, create a new account and buy the Rehub theme.

Downloading the review theme

After buying the Rehub theme, go to the Downloads section of your ThemeForest profile as shown in the picture below.

Here you can download the theme file by clicking Download → All files and documentation. (see the pic)

A zip file named “REHubWP-theme.zip” will be downloaded. Extract this file, and you will find a “rehub.zip” file inside which you should use to install the theme.

Installing and Activating the review theme

To install Rehub theme on your WordPress website, go to your dashboard, navigate to Appearance → Themes.

Find and click the “Add New” button near the top. Then click the “Upload Theme” button and in the next screen browse and find the “rehub.zip” file and click “Install.”

The Rehub theme will be installed on your website. Once it is installed click “Activate” as shown in the picture.

Registering your review theme with Themeforest purchase code (license)

After you have installed and activated the Rehub theme you need to register the theme on your website. You can import the demo websites and receive theme updates only if you have registered the theme on your site.

To do this go to Rehub on your dashboard, click on the “Registration” tab and give your Themeforest username and purchase code to register the theme on your website.

Installing the required plugins

If you go the “Plugins” tab of Rehub, there will be a list of pre-packaged plugins. Click install to install and after installation click “Activate” and activate all of them.

You can also select all of them by clicking their checkbox, and in bulk actions, you can choose to install and activate them, all in one go.

Importing the Demo data

For a beginner, it takes some time to learn to build a full-fledged review website from scratch. But there is an easier way of doing it. You can import the demo website which Rehub theme provides.

Choosing the Demo site to import

There are 10 demo sites so far, and there is a promise of more demo sites from Rehub team. Each demo is designed with a  unique concept. You can choose 1 demo based on the type of review website you want to create. So carefully check each one of the demo sites by clicking the “preview” button.

For example, let me explain what some of the demo sites are about.

Rewise – a review website which compares the pricing from popular ecommerce websites like Amazon.

Repick – a magazine-like review website which has detailed reviews of selected products.

Methods to import demo data

After you have selected which demo site to import, you need a way to import demo data. There are 2 ways to import demo data into your review website. We could use,

One Click demo import plugin – this plugin comes pre-packed with the theme. For this type of import, you need to install child themes and necessary plugin beforehand and it could get complicated. So we are not going to use this method.

All-in-One WP migration plugin – We need to install this WordPress plugin separately. But you don’t need to install any child theme for this method. We will use this plugin to import demo data.

Downloading the Demo data

Before you can import, you need to download the demo data. To download the demo data go the dashboard, Rehub → Demo Site Clones.

Here you can the messages saying its an old method. Don’t mind the message. Below you can find the demo sites. Go to the demo which you want to download and click Link→ Download. A ‘.wpress’ file will be downloaded to your computer. We will use this file to import in your review website.

Note: Save the password and username given in red color letters on this page. It is very important. We will need to use this after the demo import.

Install and activate All-in-One WP migration plugin

In the dashboard, go to Plugins → Add New, in the search bar, search for All-in-One WP migration plugin. Click ‘Install’ and then click activate to activate the plugin.

Importing the demo files

Now you can find  “All-in-One WP migration” in the dashboard. Click “Import” and in the next page click Import From → File and here import the ‘.wpress’ file that we just now downloaded.

The demo site will be imported, and then click “Proceed”. Now we are done importing.

Go and check your site; it will be changed exactly like the demo site. All we need to do is edit and change the website details and add our products and then our review website will be fully ready

Changing the admin details

Now our whole website is changed, and we will be logged out of our dashboard. We need to login to our WordPress website with the admin details which we earlier noted before downloading the demo site.

You can go to the login by adding “wp-admin.php” like this after your domain URL → www.mywebsite.com/wp-admin.php

In this page enter the demo admin details, and you will be logged into the site. Now we need to create another user and delete the demo admin details.

For this on the dashboard, go to Users → Add new, here fill in your details and click save. Make sure to create a user with user role as “Administrator”. After this, logout and sign in with the new username and password which you just now created.

Now delete the “rehubdemo” user so that no unauthorised person can access your website.

Installing WooCommere plugin

WooCommerce is an essential plugin for a product review website created using Rehub theme. You can install WooCommerce the same way we installed All-in-One WP migration plugin.

After installing and activating the WooCommerce plugin, you need to change its settings go to WooCommerce → Settings, change the settings to your preference here.

Content Egg plugin

The free version of Content Egg plugin is already installed on our website. Content egg syncs your review website with the seller’s website and updates products and prices.

It uses an API key to get the contents from the famous ecommerce websites such as Amazon. To get an API key, you need to register with the respective ecommerce website. See this article to register and get an API key with Amazon.

Importing Products using Content Egg

Once you have given the API, you can go to WooCommerce → Products → Add new and Give the name of the product, and you can find it in the suggestions. Choose the correct product considering all the variations.

Content Egg Pro for other web stores

The free version has options for few sites like Amazon, Pixabay, Youtube and some other sites. Content egg Pro has many popular websites (even some country-based sites). If you want to write reviews of products from one of the Pro sites you need to upgrade. See which sites are supported in Content Egg Pro here.

Affiliate Egg

Affiliate egg is a premium plugin which can be integrated with Rehub and Content Egg. It does not use an API key. It is web scraper which scraped data from web pages. If the seller does not provide an API key you can simply scrape the data from their website using this plugin. There are many famous websites which can be scraped and data imported using Affiliate egg. Check the sites here.

Rehub Theme Settings

On your dashboard, go to Rehub → Theme Options, here you can find the complete settings of your review website. There are so many options from General settings, Menus, Fonts, Colors etc.,

Take some time to explore each and every one of those settings. You can check the Rehub Product Documentation for the complete details of all the settings.

Creating your first review post

Adding a review post is very easy with Rehub. It’s just like adding another blog post. First you have to choose the blog layout you want by going to Rehub → Theme Options → General Settings. Choose the layouts and other settings you want in here.

Then go to Post → Add new, Give the heading, feature image and other images, and you review contents about a product.

Filling the Content Egg Contents

If you are using Content Egg with you fill the product information so that your referral link to ecommerce websites will be posted.

It good to use it with multiple ecommerce sites, so that your readers can compare the pricing from various sites and find the best deal. When you have pricing history enabled it could also be very useful.

Emedding reviews with Rehub Shortcode generator

Shortcodes are like a shortcut, in WordPress shortcodes can embed files or create objects using  code in just one line. They are written within square brackets like the one below

[wpsm_column size=”one-half” position=”last”]

Rehub has a Shortcode generator through which you can create and embed any of the review features like a Review box, Affiliate button and many more. You can find in the top of all single post pages like in the image

Click the “[s]” and the shortcode generator will open and here you can choose what content to insert. Once you have finished everything click “Insert” the shortcode will be inserted into the post. If you want to move it you can just ‘cut and paste’ it where you want.

Publishing the Review post

Then choose a category or create a new category for you post and then fill in the tags. If you’re done click “Publish”. Now you review post will be published

Wow, we have create a full-fledged review website and posted our first product review in just a matter of few minutes. This is just a beginning. When you get used to WordPress and Rehub, you can do a lot more. You can even create exciting review website even from scratch.

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