How to Add Reviews to Thinkific: Code View, Site Side

Two things decide whether this works on Thinkific, and only one of them is mechanical. The mechanical one is that the embed has to go into the code view of a Text and Media section rather than into the text view, or it prints as visible markup. The other is a judgement call the platform forces on you: a Thinkific school has a public marketing side and a private course side, and reviews earn their keep on exactly one of them.

The Code View Button Is Not Optional

Thinkific documents the flow for embedding third-party content on a landing page: add a Text and Media section, open its details, remove any default text you do not need, click the code view button in the text editor, paste the embed, click the code button again to exit, and save.

Skipping the code view is the failure that brings most people to a guide like this one. The normal text view is a rich text editor, and a rich text editor treats angle brackets as characters to display rather than as markup to run, so the page ends up showing your snippet to visitors as a line of code.

Exit code view before saving. The toggle is a mode rather than a destination, and leaving it open occasionally produces surprising results in the saved content. Click it again, confirm the section looks sane, then save.

A School Has Two Surfaces

Thinkific gives you site pages, built in Site Builder and visible to anyone, and the course player, visible only to enrolled students. They are different audiences at different points, and content that helps one is usually wasted on the other.

Reviews are an argument for enrolling. Their entire job is to move someone from considering the course to buying it, which means they belong on the pages that person sees before they pay: the home page, the course landing page, the sales page for a bundle.

Inside the curriculum they do almost nothing. A student reading lesson four has already been convinced, already paid, and is now trying to learn something. Testimonials at that point are at best neutral and at worst a distraction from the thing they came for.

Course Landing Pages Are the Right Home

If you only put the widget in one place, put it on the landing page for your main course, below the curriculum outline and above the enrol button. That is the point where a visitor has understood what they would be buying and is deciding whether you are worth it.

The curriculum outline answers what and the reviews answer whether. Putting them in that order means the evidence arrives when the question it answers has just been asked, which is worth more than the same widget higher up the page.

On a school with several courses, each landing page can carry the same widget. The reviews are about you rather than about one course, and a student choosing between two of your courses is not choosing between two businesses.

Which Reviews Belong Here

A course business usually has feedback in more than one place: comments inside the platform, replies to emails, messages from students. Those are useful and they are not the same thing as a public review on a profile a stranger can check.

The value of a widget is precisely that the stranger can check it. The rating shown comes from the platform aggregate and the profile is one click away, so nothing is being asserted that a sceptical visitor cannot verify in five seconds.

That verifiability is what makes it different from a testimonials section typed into the page by hand. Both look similar. Only one of them survives someone deciding to check.

How Do You Build the Widget?

Paste your Google, Trustpilot or Facebook profile URL, preview your real reviews and rating, then choose from over 100 layout styles across the slider, marquee, grid, list, masonry and badge families, and set the colours to your school theme.

A slider or a single row usually suits a course landing page better than a tall grid, because the page already has a long curriculum section competing for the same attention and adding a second tall block pushes the enrol button further away.

Free plan, unlimited widget views. Course launches produce traffic in bursts rather than steadily, and a view ceiling would be hit on exactly the day it matters most.

Where Should the Reviews Go?

Below the curriculum and directly above the enrol button on each course landing page. That is the last thing read before the decision, and it is the position where a rating does the most work.

A compact badge in the site header or near the pricing block is worth adding for visitors who arrive further down the funnel or who skim rather than read. It costs almost no height and catches the people who never reach the bottom of the page.

Keep it out of the course player and out of the checkout. The first has an audience that has already bought, and the second has one job that nothing should interrupt.