A good testimonial page is judged on one thing: can a visitor find somebody like themselves in under ten seconds. The five below are public pages you can open and inspect, ranked on that test, with what each does that a small business can reproduce with 18 testimonials rather than eighteen hundred.
Best testimonial pages: the ranking, and the criterion
- HubSpot: Case studies: Filters by industry, company size and product, so a reader finds somebody like themselves in a couple of clicks.
- Zapier: Customer stories: Each story states the job to be done in the heading, which is how a reader recognises their own problem.
- Slack: Customer stories: Outcome-first summaries mean the page still works for somebody who reads nothing but the headings.
- Shopify: Case studies: Long-form stories with named merchants and specific numbers: the format to aim at once you have a few case studies.
- Basecamp: Customers: Proof that a plain page of attributed quotes, with no design at all, does the job.
The ten-second test
Somebody arrives believing their situation is unusual. The page either shows them a customer of their size, industry or problem quickly, or it shows them a wall of praise from strangers. Only the first changes a decision.
Filters versus curation
Big companies filter by industry and size. A small business achieves the same thing by putting the right two quotes on the right page rather than all of them in one place, which needs a record of who said what.
What every one of them does
Names the person, the role and the company; keeps the claim specific; and never runs a quote that could have been written about anybody. None of them runs a quote that says the team was a pleasure to work with, because that sentence has never persuaded anybody of anything and every one of these pages knows it.
Questions people ask about best testimonial pages
Do I need a page like these?
Not at first. Two attributed quotes on your services page beat an empty page called Testimonials.
Should I show logos?
Only with permission, and only if the logo means something to the reader. A wall of logos with no words is decoration.
How do I keep it current?
Date every testimonial in the record and review the page once a year; a quote about a product you no longer sell is worse than an empty space.