How to Add Reviews to Duda: One Site or Fifty

Most website builders are used by the person who owns the business. Duda is mostly used by agencies building sites for other people, and that changes which question matters first. The mechanics take about a minute: drag the HTML widget onto the page, right-click, Edit Content, paste. The question that actually causes trouble is upstream of that, and it is whose reviews the widget is showing. A review widget is bound to one business profile. If you put it into a site template that several client sites are built from, every one of those sites shows the first client's reviews, and nobody notices until a client does.

Are You Building One Site or a Template?

This is the Duda-specific fork. If you are working inside an individual client site, drop the HTML widget in and paste that client's embed. Nothing else applies.

If you are working in a site template that other client sites will be built from, do not put a configured review widget in it. Template content carries into every site created from that template, and a review widget carries a specific business profile with it. The result is a plumber's website showing a dentist's reviews.

What can go into the template is the layout: the section, the heading, the spacing, an empty HTML widget as a placeholder. Then each client site gets its own embed pasted into the placeholder as part of setup, which takes a minute per site and is the difference between a repeatable process and a support ticket.

The same logic applies to anything you duplicate. Copying a finished client site as the starting point for the next one is common and efficient, and the reviews widget is one of the handful of things that must be re-pointed rather than inherited.

Where the HTML Widget Lives

In the Widgets panel of the Duda editor. Drag it onto the page, then right-click the placed widget and choose Edit Content, or use the floating menu if you are on a newer editor version. A text box opens and you paste the embed into it.

Duda recommends placing the widget in its own column or container rather than nesting it among other elements, which helps accessibility and, in practice, makes the section easier to move and to make responsive later.

The widget is page level. It appears on the page you put it on rather than across the site, so a reviews section on the home page and a compact badge on the contact page are two placements rather than one setting.

There is nothing to install. Duda has a Widget Builder for agencies who want to package their own reusable components, and that is a genuinely useful tool, but it is aimed at building a widget rather than embedding one. For a review widget the built-in HTML widget is the whole answer.

What the HTML Widget Will Not Run

Server-side code. Duda is explicit that server-side scripts such as PHP and ASP have no effect in the HTML widget, which is a reasonable thing to state given how often people paste snippets from a WordPress tutorial into a hosted builder and wonder why nothing happens.

Anything loaded over plain HTTP. The editor and published sites run over HTTPS, so a script that fetches an external non-HTTPS file will be blocked. If an embed from an older tool refuses to render, the resource URL is the first thing to check.

A different jQuery version. Duda's editor uses jQuery 3.0, and loading another version inside the widget usually stops the editor working. This one is worth remembering because the symptom is misleading: the editor breaks rather than the widget, and the natural conclusion is that Duda is having a bad day.

None of these limits affects a modern review widget embed, which is a single line of HTTPS-served markup with no server-side component and no jQuery dependency. They matter because they explain the failures you will hit with older or hand-rolled snippets.

What Happens When the Client Takes Over

Duda sites are frequently handed to the client for day-to-day editing, and an HTML widget is one of the elements a non-technical editor can damage without meaning to. Deleting a section, or opening the widget and pressing a key in the box, is enough.

The mitigation is structural rather than technical: put the widget in its own container as Duda recommends, so the section is a distinct object rather than something entangled with editable text, and tell the client what it is. A widget in a labelled section survives client editing far better than one tucked inside a text block.

It is also worth telling the client what the widget does not need from them. Because the reviews come from the live profile, nobody has to update the section when a new review arrives, and clients who do not know that sometimes try to edit the review text by hand.

If you maintain the site, keep the embed line with the client's project notes. Rebuilding it takes a minute, and having it written down turns a support request into a paste.

How Do You Build the Widget?

Paste the client's Google, Trustpilot or Facebook profile URL, preview their real reviews and rating, then pick from over 100 layout styles across slider, marquee, grid, list, masonry and badge families. Colours and fonts adjust to the site's palette, which matters more than usual on agency work where every site has its own brand.

The rating comes from the profile's own aggregate rather than from the cards on screen, so the number on the client's site matches the number on their profile. That is the claim you are making on their behalf, so it needs to survive a click-through.

Free plan, unlimited widget views. For an agency that matters twice over: no per-site licence to track across a portfolio, and no client site that quietly stops showing its reviews after a traffic spike.

Where Should the Reviews Go?

Next to whatever the site is asking a visitor to do. On the small-business sites Duda is most used for, that is usually the contact form, the booking link or the phone number, and a compact rating badge beside it does more than a full wall elsewhere on the page.

Keep one full review section on the home page, below the hero, and use badges on the interior pages. Repeating the whole section on every page is the most common thing to get wrong on a template-driven build, because it costs nothing to duplicate and quietly devalues the proof.

On a multi-location client, remember that a review profile is usually one location. If the site has a page per location, each page wants that location's own widget rather than a copy of the flagship's.