best review aggregator websites

101 Review Aggregators Guide: What They Are And Why They Matter

Rajat Singh Chauhan 10 minutes read February 14, 2024

Finding reliable and insightful reviews can be daunting in this era, where information is at our fingertips. 

Whether searching for the perfect restaurant, the latest tech gadget, or the next must-read book, pinpointing the most accurate and trustworthy reviews is crucial. 

Our blog sheds light on the intricacies of review aggregators, offering expert insights, tips, and recommendations to help you make informed decisions and save time and money. 

Read on as we delve into the world of review aggregation, uncover its complexities, and empower you to discover the finest review aggregator in the vast sea of opinions.

Let’s switch to what Review Aggregators are.

TripAdvisor Reviews

Facebook Reviews

Google Reviews

Amazon Reviews

Aliexpress Reviews

What Are Review Aggregators?

Review aggregators are web-based platforms that gather and consolidate reviews from a variety of origins, providing insights into products, services, or businesses.

They source these reviews from social media platforms, business directories, and various other review websites.

What they do is pretty simple: they gather reviews from all over the internet. These reviews come from individual websites, social media, forums, and more. 

Then, they put them all in one place and show them to you as a collection of reviews.

The cool thing is that this makes it easy to determine if a business or a product is the real deal. You don’t have to search the internet for reviews; review aggregators bring them to you in one spot. 

It’s like having many people tell you their thoughts simultaneously so you can make informed decisions without the hassle.

Let’s start with why online reviews are crucial in today’s world.

What Makes Online Reviews Crucial For Businesses?

Online reviews are pivotal in setting your business apart and enticing potential customers. 

Virtually every individual contemplating your services or products will invariably turn to reviews. 

How you fare in these reviews becomes the deciding factor between you and your rivals.

Consider these statistics to grasp the significance of online reviews for small businesses:

• Influential Decision-Makers: 93% of consumers admit that online reviews sway their purchasing choices.
• Local Business Insights: An impressive 87% of individuals actively peruse reviews for local businesses.
• Trustworthy Brand Perception: Brands that boast online reviews are trusted a striking 63% more than those without such feedback.

These statistics underscore the undeniable importance of online reviews for your business, but the question remains: Why are they so crucial? 

Let’s not overwhelm you with too much information and save it for the latter section.

Can Review Aggregators Assist With Reputation Management?

Yes, review aggregators can assist with reputation management. Review aggregators enable businesses to monitor and manage their online reputation by providing a centralized platform to collect and analyze customer feedback from various sources. 

By tracking and responding to reviews on these platforms, businesses can address customer behavior to reach marketing goals , showcase their commitment to customer satisfaction, and take steps to improve their overall reputation. 

This proactive approach to reputation management can help businesses maintain a positive image and build trust with their audience.

90% of Customers Read Online Reviews Before Buying

Easily aggregate user reviews & display on your website for free.

Trustworthy Sources To Aggregate Reviews From

The following sources are valuable for both businesses and consumers. They provide insights and feedback that can be instrumental in making informed decisions and managing a business’s online reputation .

1. Google Reviews

Google Reviews are integral to Google My Business listings. When people search for local businesses or services, they often find Google Reviews prominently displayed in search results and Google Maps . 

Customers can assign ratings and write detailed reviews about their experiences with the business, which can cover a range of aspects, from product quality to customer service. Embedding Google reviews can boost a business’s online visibility and trustworthiness.

2. Yelp Reviews

Yelp is a popular review platform that covers various types of businesses, particularly local ones. Users can leave detailed reviews, assign star ratings, and include photos of their experiences. 

Yelp allows users to share their opinions about restaurants, retail shops, and service providers. It’s known for its community-driven approach to reviews, and showcasing Yelp reviews on websites boosts social proof.

3. TripAdvisor Reviews

TripAdvisor is a go-to platform for travelers seeking information and reviews about hotels, restaurants, tourist attractions, and more. 

Users can rate their travel experiences, leave detailed reviews, and upload photos to help fellow travelers plan their trips. 

The platform is trusted by travelers worldwide for its extensive database of user-generated content, and websites can garner a lot of benefits by adding Tripadvisor reviews widget.

4. Amazon Customer Reviews

Amazon customer reviews are reviews of products sold on Amazon. Shoppers can rate products, write comments, and share their experiences to help others make informed purchase decisions. 

These reviews cover product quality, performance, and the overall buying experience. Business websites have amassed conversions and sales by embedding Amazon customer reviews .

5. Facebook Reviews

Businesses that maintain a presence on Facebook often have reviews and recommendations on their pages. 

Customers can rate the business and provide written feedback on their experiences. Adding Facebook reviews to websites can significantly impact the perception of a business, as they are visible to the business’s Facebook followers.

6. Trustpilot Reviews

Trustpilot is an independent review platform that covers a broad spectrum of businesses across different industries. It is recognized for its transparency and unbiased review collection. 

Customers can rate businesses and leave in-depth reviews that often include positive and negative experiences.

Top 5+ Review Aggregators Tools of (2023-2024)

These review aggregator platform tools serve different purposes and cater to various business needs. 

They can help companies enhance their online presence, manage their reputation, gain deeper insights from customer feedback, and facilitate customer communication. 

1. Tagembed

Tagembed is a review aggregator and analysis tool. It uses AI and natural language processing to collect and interpret customer feedback and reviews .

Tagembed assists businesses in gaining deeper insights from reviews and customer comments. 

Systematically collecting and categorizing customer reviews provides businesses with a comprehensive understanding of customer sentiments and emerging trends. 

Armed with this knowledge, companies can proactively refine their products and services, leading to more satisfying customer experiences and a competitive edge in the market. 

Tagembed offers a data-driven pathway to continuous improvement and customer-centric decision-making.

Tagbox is a user-generated content platform that allows businesses to curate and display customer reviews and social media content on their websites. 

It aggregates social content from various social media platforms , review sites, and other sources.

Tagbox helps companies build trust with potential customers by incorporating authentic user-generated content. 

It can enhance website engagement and provide social proof, as visitors can see real people discussing and endorsing products or services.

BirdEye is a comprehensive reputation management platform. It aggregates reviews from various online sources, offers review response tools, and provides insights into a company’s online reputation.

BirdEye is popular among businesses seeking to manage their online presence proactively. It helps them collect and monitor reviews, respond to feedback, and better understand their online reputation. 

This can lead to improved customer trust and loyalty.

Podium is a review and messaging platform that facilitates communication between businesses and customers. It collects reviews and enables two-way conversations through various messaging channels.

Podium’s messaging capabilities streamline customer interactions, making it easier for businesses to engage with customers. 

It also helps them manage reviews and online feedback more effectively, which can be especially useful in industries like healthcare and automotive.

Yotpo is a robust platform for customer content marketing . It helps businesses collect and leverage customer reviews, photos, and other user-generated content to enhance online credibility, engage customers, and drive marketing success. 

With features like SEO-friendly content and in-depth analytics, Yotpo is a valuable tool for modern businesses seeking to build trust and boost conversions.

Why Are Review Aggregators So Important For Consumers & Businesses?

As we promised earlier about the benefits of Review aggregators , here are a range of benefits for both consumers and businesses. 

A). Benefits for Consumers:

• Informed Decision-Making – Review aggregators provide consumers with a wealth of information and opinions from multiple sources. This helps them make more informed product, service, and business decisions.
• Transparency – Review aggregators promote transparency by presenting positive and negative feedback about a product or service. This allows consumers to evaluate potential drawbacks and benefits.
• Efficiency – Consumers can quickly access various reviews and ratings in one place, saving time and effort when researching products or services.
• Trust and Credibility – Reviews from fellow consumers and expert critics on these platforms can be more trusted and credible, as they often reflect real experiences and insights.
• Community Engagement – Some review aggregators foster communities where consumers can ask questions, share experiences, and seek advice from others with similar interests or needs.

B). Benefits for Businesses:

• Improved Reputation Management – Review aggregators enable businesses to monitor and manage their online reputation. Responding to positive and negative reviews can demonstrate a commitment to customer satisfaction.
• Customer Feedback Insights – Analyzing the feedback collected on these platforms provides various businesses with valuable insights into customer preferences, pain points, and areas for improvement.
• Competitive Analysis – By comparing their reviews and ratings to those of competitors, businesses can identify areas where they excel and where they may need to catch up. This information is valuable for competitive analysis and strategic planning.
• Increased Visibility – High ratings and positive reviews on review aggregators can increase visibility and trust. Many consumers check these platforms before purchasing, making a positive presence necessary.
• Data-Driven Decision Making – Businesses can use the data and review trends to make data-driven decisions regarding product development, customer service enhancements, and marketing strategies.
• Marketing Material – Positive 5-star reviews and ratings from review aggregators can be used as marketing material to build trust with potential customers. They serve as social proof of a business’s quality.
• Customer Engagement – Engaging with customers on these platforms can foster stronger relationships, resolve issues, and show a commitment to customer satisfaction.
• Customer Loyalty – Addressing concerns and incorporating feedback can increase customer loyalty and repeat business.
• Benchmarking and Performance Tracking – Review aggregators can serve as benchmarks for businesses to track their performance over time and set improvement goals.

Wrapping Up!

Review aggregators are indispensable tools in today’s digital landscape. They serve as information hubs, bringing together consumer opinions and expert reviews to help individuals make informed decisions. 

Whether you are looking for the perfect restaurant, a reliable product, or trustworthy services, review aggregators are your go-to source for transparency and credibility. 

These platforms offer valuable business insights, helping to manage reputations, engage with customers, and drive improvements based on honest feedback. 

Review aggregators have truly changed how we explore the world and have become essential to the consumer-business relationship.

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The 25 Best Review Platforms

Definition | Benefits of Reviews | Best Platforms |

The most popular review platforms are generally those that aggregate user reviews in a way that makes it easy for consumers to sift through them and understand more about the product or service.

Given that most consumers rely on user reviews to inform their purchase decisions, it’s hard to overestimate the importance of these review platforms for businesses.

What is a review platform?

A review platform is a site which collects user reviews of products and services and then displays them according to various filters such as star rating.

The purpose of the review platform is to highlight the experience of customers who have had hands-on experience with the product or service. Since it’s not always easy to take a company’s word about its products or services at face value, many consumers like to browse through user reviews before they part with their cash.

The review platform is, as such, an essential tool for both business owners and customers. It can make or break a company’s reputation and credibility, so it’s in the interest of business owners to ensure they provide a five-star service to their clientele.

While reviews aren’t everything, it’s hard to uphold a positive online reputation without them. Even if the reviews for the company aren’t 100% positive, more reviews inevitably leads to more exposure and increased visibility. This usually results in customer interest, which can usually be converted into sales.

What are the benefits of having customer reviews?

Customer reviews should form an integral part of your marketing efforts if you’re a business owner. If you neglect them, they can tear your business down by tarnishing your reputation, but if you nurture them they can skyrocket your sales and propel you to further growth and success.

1. Easier purchasing decision 

If you want to secure more sales, putting more time and effort into your marketing strategy seems like a wise course of action.

Yet, you don’t necessarily need to spend a lot of money or even that much time.

How is that possible?

Well, let’s just say that the user review should be seen as a powerful (and free) marketing tool that you should take advantage of.

The magic phrase here is social proof.

Reviews provide your product or service with a legitimacy that you won’t find anywhere else. That’s because the words come from your customer base.

This social proof can ease a customer’s concerns about the product on offer and perhaps even convince them to make the decision to purchase .

2. Better clickthrough rates 

As a business, you want your customers to not just show interest in what you have to offer but to make purchases.

After all, without sales, all the interest in the world won’t mean anything for your financial goals.

To improve clickthrough rates, star ratings are something you need to pay attention to.

While there are ways of using negative reviews in your favor, it goes without saying that glowing four, and five-star reviews are best.

These four and five star reviews will most likely boost your clickthrough rates, as customers will have a much easier time parting with their cash if they perceive the product as well-rated.

It’s much harder to convince someone to invest in a two-star product than a four-star one, so you should do your best to keep customers happy so you can shoot for the stars.

3. Trustworthiness

Businesses sometimes have a bad reputation.

Due to the amount of misleading marketing out there, and the number of cutthroat entrepreneurs who care about nothing other than sales, it makes sense that the average customer is reluctant to trust a company’s words.

That isn’t to say you can’t have an effect with your words; it just means that your words have more power if your customer base backs them up .

You could claim that your product is the best in its category and even have third-party testing to back up your claims, but if a few hundred people have bad things to say about it, then your sales will likely suffer.

You need to foster customer trust and loyalty by proving that you are sincere and responsive to customer feedback.  

4. Provides Useful Feedback

Without customer feedback, how can you improve upon the products/services you offer?

Reviews are essential for the improvement process, since they give you invaluable information that – if used correctly – can help you increase customer satisfaction going forward.

While it isn’t always easy to hear, negative feedback and criticism from customers are very useful.

Because it shows you if your product has any clear flaws or issues that need to be addressed. It’s very challenging to climb the rankings and get flawless star ratings if a lot of customers have drawn attention to the same problem.

As such, feedback, regardless of whether it is positive or negative, is essential for any business to grow.

What are the best review platforms? 

We’ve gathered together 25 of the best review platforms, so you know exactly where to go for real product feedback whether you’re a customer or a business owner.

These platforms all do a great job at presenting the user reviews in a way that’s easy to understand, and easy for you to browse according to various filters so you can quickly find the information you need to make a purchase decision or find out what customers are saying about your business.

1. Trustindex 

Trustindex is used by more than 20,000 businesses, as a platform to display customer reviews and increase sales.

If you’re having trouble finding the best way to proudly show off your five-star reviews and recommendations, then you needn’t look further. Trustindex offers a wide variety of widgets for popular review platforms such as Google, Amazon, and Yelp to help you boost your SEO ranking and customer trust.

2. TripAdvisor 

TripAdvisor is a review platform that focuses on the travel and leisure industry.

It’s ideal for holidaymakers and businesses in the tourism and hospitality sectors, looking to improve the overall customer experience.

The huge review platform receives an estimated 390 million unique monthly visits across its 49 sites, from customers and business owners from all over the world.

3. Google My Business

Google My Business is a service that allows customers to check out local business ratings, and business owners to manage their online reputation and visibility.

It’s an essential tool for business owners as it allows them to be found online and locally, especially if they focus on boosting their local SEO.

Given that most consumers use Google on a regular basis, it’s a great platform to leverage for visibility and for customers it’s easy to find out information about a business quickly.

4. Facebook

Facebook is first and foremost a social media platform facilitating social connections and conversation, but it is also widely used as a review platform.

If you set up a business page on Facebook, you can reach a lot of potential customers through the ‘shares’ and ‘likes’ you collect.

It’s currently estimated that there are around 2.89 billion active monthly users on Facebook, so this should dispel any doubts about the visibility you can achieve with Facebook reviews.

Amazon is one of the largest online retailers, stocking products from thousands of companies all over the world.

That makes it an excellent review aggregator, and a great website to visit to get an idea about a product or service from the customers themselves.

With an estimated 2.45 billion average monthly visits this year, you can’t argue with the importance of a site like Amazon for customer reviews.

Yelp is all about crowd-sourced business reviews, covering everything from dentists to hair salons.

As such, it’s a great review platform for service-based businesses and for consumers looking for the best price/quality nearby.

Yelp brings in around 178 million unique visitors every month.

7. Better Business Bureau

The Better Business Bureau, or BBB, is all about fostering customer trust by revealing what a business is really like.

This review platform is for discerning customers looking for a reliable company, and for business owners it’s an important platform to come across well on.

The BBB receives around 7 million monthly visitors every month.

8. Foursquare City Guide

Foursquare City Guide, as you might have guessed from the name, provides reviews about businesses locally in your city.

The app will give users personalized recommendations based on their preferences, so as a business owner you want to be one of the first local businesses to pop up for customers.

The platform receives around 3 billion global visits each month.

9. Yellowpages

Yellowpages is perhaps best known as the large catalogue which you turn to whenever you need to find a local business.

Through the review platform’s website, customers can write reviews and browse existing reviews to inform their purchase decisions.

Yellowpages has on average 60 million monthly visitors.

10. Trustpilot

Trustpilot is one of the most trusted online review platforms, with more than 500,000 companies in its database.

It’s a dedicated review platform that covers a variety of niches from health and fitness to clothing and even travel insurance.

As such, it’s a good website to rank well on if you have a niche business.

If you are looking for good Trustpilot alternatives read our article.

Angi, formerly Angie’s List, is an online directory which provides crowd-sourced reviews for contractors and businesses in your area.

As such, it’s a good review platform to perform well on if you’re an independent contractor or if you run a small local business.

The website receives around 10-11 million monthly visits.

12. Glassdoor

Glassdoor is the go-to website for finding information about businesses and what they are like to work for.

As such, it’s an important website for hiring future employees or for job seekers trying to secure their next position.

If you treat your employees well, you can rank highly on Glassdoor and boost your online reputation. There are around 67 million unique monthly viewers.

13. Choice Reviews

Choice Reviews is part of the Association of College and Research Libraries and gives users access to hundreds of thousands of academic reviews.

As such, if you’re in the education niche, supplying academic textbooks and the like, then you’ll want to make sure you rank highly on the website.

Which? is a UK-based website and magazine which is all about promoting consumer choice.

The brand presents various options to its customers based on reviews and ratings as well as in-house testing, so it’s a great website to be featured on.

15. ConsumerReports

Consumer Reports, formerly Consumers Union, is a nonprofit based in the US which serves the consumer through independent product testing.

The review platform conducts its own through research and testing to put products through their paces and provide customers with a detailed assessment.

The website targets every type of product from fridges to exercise bikes, and has an estimated average of 13 million unique monthly visitors.

16. Consumer Affairs

Consumer Affairs is a website built on the idea that ‘knowledge is power’.

As such, it’s a website that promotes transparency and seeks to get to the bottom of company’s claims about their products and services.

Covering an extensive list of business types and services, from insurance to movers, it’s a go-to review platform for many customers. It draws in on average around 4 million unique monthly visitors.

17. Citysearch

Citysearch is an online city guide that can provide holidaymakers and tourists with all the information they need to know about business in various niches in their destination.

For example, if you’re heading to Chicago and you want some pizza restaurant recommendations, you can use Citysearch to see the options along with user reviews and ratings.

It is considered to be one of the most popular local city guides in the US, helping around 11 million customers a month to reach a purchase decision.

18. Yahoo! Local Listings

While Google My Business is one of the most popular local business listing platforms, Yahoo! has its own rival service called Local Listings.

With this service, you can claim your business listing online and manage it to make it possible for customers to find you locally.

It’s a good platform to boost your local visibility, as on average Yahoo! receives 200 million unique monthly visitors.

19. Influenster

A review platform for influencing purchase decisions, Influenster aims to show customers reviews from ‘people just like you’.

The platform relies on modern metrics such as social media analytics to assess a product’s popularity across social media.

As such, it’s a good website for the young, modern consumer. It has around 2.5 million monthly unique visitors.

20. G2 

Not all products are physical, these days there’s a huge demand and market for software.

G2 is one of the best websites to head to for detailed reviews on software options, so if you’re a tech company or startup it’s a good website to rank well on.

There are around 5 million monthly visitors to the website.

21. TrustRadius

TrustRadius is another software reviews platform, so again, if you’re a tech company selling digital property to other businesses then it’s worth checking the site out.

There are around 1 million monthly visitors, which may not seem like much, but considering it’s a specific niche it’s a large audience for software companies.

22. Manta Business Reviews

Manta Business Reviews provides reviews for around 35 million businesses.

You can claim your business listing on the website to boost your visibility, and tap into the pool of customers that regularly use the website.

23. GoodFirms

GoodFirms provides reviews for service-based companies and software products.

If you work for, or run, a B2B (Business to Business) tech company then GoodFirms is a website you’ll want to look into.

The website receives around 700,000 monthly visitors.

24. HubSpot App Marketplace

HubSpot is a popular online marketing company, but it’s the App Marketplace we’re interested in for customer reviews.

Through the website, you can find out what customers have to say about your app or about an app you’re looking to invest in for your business.

It’s a reliable website that can help inform your app purchase decisions.

25. Capterra

Capterra is a well-respected website that brings software reviews to the masses. It refers to itself as the ‘world’s leading software reviews and selection platform’ which means it has a lot of clout in the software industry and it’s an invaluable resource to businesses in the niche.

As such, it’s an excellent review platform to aim for if you sell software to businesses or directly to consumers.

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Why You Should Use a Review Aggregator (+Best Tools)

As a business, you need to keep a keen eye on what your customers are saying about you. Your online reviews largely control the perception of your  brand , which you must manage as much as possible.

Review aggregators are platforms that collect a large amount of reviews on a product, service, or business. It then “aggregates” and gives an average score. Consumers use that score to assess your business, its products and services.

It affects their purchasing decision, which is why they’re so important.

Don’t know much about them? Don’t worry, this guide will cover everything you need to know, including:

• What a review aggregator is
• Why your business should care about review aggregators
• The 15 most important review aggregators to focus on
• How to manage your reviews with ReviewBot

Ready? Let’s get started.

What Is a Review Aggregator?

Review aggregators are platforms that collect reviews on a product or service, ranking them based on an accumulated average score. Consumers use them to help with research before making a purchasing decision.

Review aggregators exist for a number of different industries, products, services, and niches. Some popular examples include:

• Rotten Tomatoes for films/movies/TV series
• Metacritic for video games
• Yelp for local businesses
• Glassdoor for employer reviews
• Google Play Store for Android apps
• App Store for Apple apps
• G2 for software reviews

Review aggregators make it extremely easy for consumers to compare products and services, based on available reviews. Some of them are websites, while others are software apps.

Why Should Your Business Care About Review Aggregators?

Review aggregators are important to consider for your business because they can influence your sales. Consumers will go to review aggregator platforms and assess the quality of a product or service. They’ll compare it to other options available on the marketplace.

For instance, the Rotten Tomatoes score of a film/movie can greatly affect how many people pay to see it. The same is true for buying games, based on a Metacritic score. In fact,  every additional 5 points over an 80+ Metacritic score equates to double the sales .

As a business, you need to keep a keen eye on all review aggregator platforms that feature your products or services. They’re the best indicator of how good what you’re offering is, and where you stand compared to the competition. It’ll also give you a good idea where you can improve.

These Are the Most Important Review Aggregators to Focus On

There are quite a few review aggregators out there — a lot of them aren’t worth your time. Below we’ll list the most important ones you should focus on. Depending on the nature of your business not all of them will apply to you.

The  App Store  is an Apple platform that allows consumers to browse, purchase, and download Apple-based apps. Users can leave  reviews  for each app they use, which affects its aggregated score.

The platform allows users to identify all the highest rated, most popular apps for their Apple devices. Filters can be added to make this an easier process. The apps can be used on any Apple device, including the:

• Apple Watch

With over 1.8 million different apps on the platform, there’s endless options for Apple users. The most popular apps include Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat.

• Google Play Store

The  Google Play Store  is a Google platform that acts as the official app store for Android devices. On it, Android users can browse, purchase, and download various different apps created for the Android operating system.

The platform also acts as a  review aggregator for the apps , hosting a large amount of user reviews. If you’ve bought an app from the Google Play Store you’re able to give a review yourself. Each app has an aggregated total score, which makes it easy to assess quality.

Aside from Android apps the store also features music, books, films/movies, and TV series.

And if there's something hugely important for mobile apps to focus on, it's their reviews: both good and bad. Replying to criticism and appreciating compliments gives new potential users a sign that you care. ReviewBot gives you instant alerts on new reviews so you can be fast in your customer support.

Yelp business pages

Yelp  is a crowd-source local business review and social media site. The platform allows businesses to create their own pages, which customers can leave  reviews  on. For businesses, the page is a resource that gives important information to potential customers.

Local businesses can set up their Yelp business page, adding images, opening hours, product/service details — and much more. It’s also possible to  respond to user reviews , which is important for  online reputation management .

Consumers can use the platform to assess the quality of local businesses. The user reviews of each business adds to an aggregated score, which makes it easy to compare available options.

Amazon  is the world’s largest online e-commerce marketplace, selling just about anything and everything. As a business, the platform offers a place for one to sell its products to a large audience.

Amazon sellers can set up a storefront where consumers can buy their products and leave  reviews . Every product an Amazon seller puts up for sale will have an aggregated review score, based on all its reviews.

Amazon storefronts also can be reviewed by users, which adds to its overall score. The quality of reviews are important on Amazon as it influences consumer purchasing decisions. Being able to assess product and seller quality is an essential component to consumer research.

• Google My Business

google-business-review-aggregator

Google My Business  is a platform for local businesses that combines with Google Maps and Google search. Businesses will have a business profile that shows up during a localized search query, or on Google Maps. The profile includes a variety of details about the business, including:

• Business name
• Physical location/address
• Phone number
• About/blurb
• Google posts
• User reviews
• Aggregated review score

The platform provides a way for local businesses to connect with local search users. Consumers can browse all location options, comparing user reviews, and the overall aggregated score, which is out of 5 stars.

iTunes for podcasts

iTunes  is a client app for the iTunes store, which offers a wide variety of digital multimedia. Some of the types of things on the platform include:

• Movies/films

Aside from offering those, the iTunes client app doubles as a multimedia library, categorizing a user’s digital collection. It also works as a media player and CD ripper.

The iTunes store is a great place for businesses that want — or have — a podcast. It makes it accessible to a large number of people.  Users can leave reviews , which affects an aggregated score. Consumers can easily sort through all the best podcasts available, choosing the best.

The  Mac App Store  — also known as the App Store — is a platform that offers Mac operating system apps. Consumers can buy/download all sorts of different softwares for their Macs, including:

• Safari browser extensions
• Apple arcade games

Developers can join the Apple Developer Program, which allows them to submit apps for consideration. If successful, their apps can be featured on the App store.

All Mac App Store apps can be  reviewed by users , which adds the app’s aggregated review score. This score makes it easy for individuals to compare apps, making it easy to find high quality options.

Trustpilot  is a consumer review website that allows individuals to write reviews for various businesses. The categories of businesses reviewed are diverse, including things like:

• Travel insurance
• Jewellery stores
• Car dealerships
• Furniture stores
• Pet services
• Dental services

Those are just a few of the many — Trustpilot pretty much covers all industries and niches.

For businesses, Trustpilot is used similarly to  Yelp  and Google My Business in that you set up a page. It’ll include images, product and service details, opening hours, a website and a phone number.

Each business will have an aggregated review score, based on all the reviews they’ve received. Consumers can use this accumulative score to easily find the best options available to them.

Angie's List

Angie’s List  is a crowd-sourced review website for local businesses and contractors. It covers popular services like:

• Landscaping
• Housecleaning

Consumers can enter in their ZIP code and compare the top-rated service providers in their area. The ratings of each business/contractor is determined by price, quality, responsiveness, punctuality, and professionalism.

Each business/contractor has its own page, which includes images, service details, a website, physical location, and phone number. All individual reviews are also visible, along with an aggregated score. This makes it easy for users of the platform to find the best option for them.

Glassdoor  is a job search engine and review website where employees can anonymously review its employers. The reviews critique specific aspects of employment, including benefits packages, salary, and work environment.

The platform makes it easy for employees who are currently unemployed, or receiving additional offers to make informed career decisions. Employees are able to claim their company profile on Glassdoor, which includes important information about the organization.

Each employer has an aggregated review score, based on all the reviews given by employees. Glassdoor has a stringent screening process that ensures all reviews are authentic, actually coming from real employees. This makes it a great resource for employees to browse.

Foursquare  is a local search-and-discovery app that recommends locations, based on the user’s geographical location. Dubbed the “Foursquare City Guide,” the app will identify local restaurants, cafes, shops, bars, nightclubs, theater, and much more.

Using the app, consumers can discover new spots they’ve never known about before, creating opportunities for new experiences.

Each local business has its own page, which includes important information, like:

Each local business has an aggregated review score out of 10, which is based on all the user reviews given. This makes it easy for consumers to find high quality local options in their neighbourhood.

Capterra  is an online marketplace and review website for business softwares. On the platform consumers can review and compare software from over 700+ different categories — examples include:

• Customer relationship management (CRM)
• Email marketing
• Human resources
• Helpdesk software
• Inventory management
• Task management

Software vendors can create listings for their products and services. Your product profile will include features, screenshots, and reviews.

Each individual software product has an aggregated review score, based on all user reviews. This makes it effortless for individuals to compare all available options.

GoodFirms  is a research and review platform for finding better software and service providers. With it, consumers can find the best solutions available for their specific needs. Some of the software categories featured on the platform include:

• Document management
• Marketing automation

For service providers you’ve got mobile app development, SEO services, digital marketing, web design, e-commerce, and many others.

GoodFirms serves as an effective consumer research tool for those that need business software. The platform makes it easy to compare all available options. Each specific product and service has an aggregated review score, based on all user reviews.

G2  is a tech marketplace and review platform for business software and services. Real, authenticated reviews are used to give each individual product and service provider an aggregated score.

The platform covers a wide variety of different software categories — popular examples include:

• Payment gateways
• Mobile app development

Software developers can claim a listing for their products and services. The profile page will include essential information, like pricing, a short biography, contact details, and a website. There’s also the aggregated review score, based on all user reviews.

Yahoo! Local Listings

Yahoo Local Listings  provide a way for you to control your local business listings across 70+ different online listings. Dubbed “Localworks,” users can keep their various listings up-to-date regarding business information.

The all-in-one platform gives you easy access to all the reviews across your listings. You can easily optimize for search engines, GPS, social media, apps, and digital maps. By aggregating all of your business profile listings, it saves you time and effort.

Here's How to use ReviewBot to Manage Your Reviews in One Place

Managing all the reviews your business and its products/services can be time consuming. With so many different business listings and platforms you need to be on, you’d have to visit them all. What you need is a tool that can manage all of your reviews in one place.

ReviewBot  can help you do this. It scans all of your reviews across all the major platforms, such as:

• The App Store

Real-time tracking will keep you apprised of any and all new reviews. You’ll be sent a notification, so you can respond promptly, ensuring time sensitivity. Notifications can also be filtered according to feedback, so you’re only alerted of reviews you care about.

ReviewBot effortlessly integrates with Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Zendesk — it’ll fit in with your other tools. Other great features include competitor tracking, automatic language translation, status reports, and social sharing.

With ReviewBot, you’ll be able to more easily manage your online reviews, taking your reputation management to the next level.

In this guide we covered everything you need to know about review aggregators.

Review aggregators accumulate large amounts of user reviews on a product, service, or business. They spit out an average, accumulative score, which consumers use as a research tool.

They — review aggregators — influence consumer purchasing decisions, which is why they matter for your business.

Make sure you keep your customer feedback in check with ReviewBot . With a 14-day free trial and plans starting at just 5$/month, any business can now show their users that they care about them. 

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Nikola Bojkov

What is a review aggregator + best tools.

Learn what a review aggregator is and how it solves brands' main problem—fragmented customer reviews across multiple platforms.

Customer reviews are the lifeblood of any brand. They influence purchase decisions, build credibility, and can even affect search engine rankings. But here’s the catch—reviews are scattered across multiple platforms, making it a Herculean task for brands to monitor, analyze, and leverage them effectively.

The solution: review aggregators – powerful tools that compile feedback from lots of sources into one accessible platform. But these aggregators aren’t just beneficial for consumers looking to make informed decisions; they offer a goldmine of insights for businesses, too.

Let’s give you the scoop on why review aggregators exist and present you with the best review aggregator platforms and software apps out there that can boost your business in no time!

What are review aggregators?

Review aggregators are websites that gather user-generated feedback on various goods, services, companies, and other consumer-related experiences. Typically, they offer written reviews, professional testimonials, and UGC collected from various websites, blogs, social media channels, etc.  Review aggregator meaning

The main purpose of these platforms is to offer consumers a curated summary of what others like them are saying about commercial products and services. Upon visiting them, you often find a collective average score or rating about the product in question and various review samples.

That way, you can quickly determine the worth of the item or service without searching the internet. Plus, you’ll see the viewpoints of a diverse spectrum of individuals that cover every aspect of the reviewed product, allowing you to make the best decision possible.

Review aggregators usually use algorithms to evaluate and display this data in an approachable manner, facilitating your ability to contrast choices and select the best one.

How do review aggregators work?

Advanced review aggregators use direct API integrations or search the internet to gather every user review or other type of customer feedback they can find about a brand’s products and services from various sources.

Initially, review aggregators collect data by implementing sophisticated web crawling algorithms to get search results through forums, Google search, social media platforms, review sites , related web pages, etc. This is a more ‘unethical’ approach and may lead to bans; that is why the best is to use a platform like EmbedReviews that uses direct API integrations with the reviews websites.

Then, they organize this data and display it in a simple and readable format with various filtering options.

Moreover, tools like EmbedReviews provide a versatile solution: they both collect reviews and other user-generated content from diverse online sources (websites, social media sites, etc.), and they allow users to manually upload every feedback they receive, including word-of-mouth and physical welcome books.

Here are the practical steps of how review aggregators like EmbedReviews work:

This flexibility ensures that all valuable reviews and testimonials are incorporated into the review aggregation process, providing a holistic view of customer experiences. Therefore, when a business values customer feedback, its success can only increase.

Note: Some platforms, suc h as Yelp, do not allow scraping for reviews.

4 reasons why you need an aggregator for online reviews!

Review aggregators come with several benefits for businesses, including building and managing their online reputation, influencing customer behavior, increasing online visibility, identifying problem areas, attracting new customers, etc. Let’s dive deeper into some of them.

1. They provide social proof of your product quality

Let’s not kid ourselves: we often buy or subscribe to something because others have gotten it and swear by it. That’s what favorable reviews do for brands, local businesses, and consumers—they tell you whether the new car, clothes, restaurant or anything else you are considering is worth your money.

Most businesses nowadays have started recognizing the power of social proof , i.e., honest and positive reviews, to show the public that their offer is of excellent quality.

For instance, check out how Florence by Mills — Millie Bobby Brown’s beauty brand — is banking on their customer’s reviews to convince other shoppers to join in the fun!

Do you know how they did it? They used EmbedReviews to collect all their reviews and place them in an embeddable widget on their website. They even customized it with their branding and style!

2. They contribute to your reputation management

Using review aggregators for collecting reviews can help businesses efficiently and easily manage their reputation, especially local ones, as they offer a single, central location for all client reviews.

Think about a restaurant that receives criticism from a variety of sources. These evaluations are collected and organized by a review aggregator, enabling the restaurant to react and respond to favorable and unfavorable comments quickly.

This simplified process demonstrates a dedication to client happiness and makes it possible for the business to handle complaints to improve its online image.

Businesses can get new reviews and then showcase these reviews on their websites as social proof.

Here’s an example of Oval Motel, using the Google reviews badge to show their high 4.6  Google rating from  1412  reviews

3. They help you gain a competitive advantage via valuable insights

Data is very important today, and the information provided by review aggregators is invaluable to businesses since it offers insights into the preferences and opinions of their customers.

By understanding client input on features, services, cost, or delivery, companies could improve their marketing tactics and make sure that their products and services are exactly what the consumer wants and needs. By efficiently meeting changing customer trends, this data-driven strategy promotes product innovation and puts companies ahead of the competition.

For example, if you own a hotel, you’ll get online reviews on different online platforms, including Google reviews, Booking, Tripadvisor, etc. With a review aggregator, you can collect, analyze reviews, and use these reviews to improve your services and stay ahead of the hotels nearby.

Here’s a review that could help this hotel improve further:

4. They help you increase customer engagement

Engaging customers is essential to fostering brand loyalty. An online review aggregator increases engagement with more customers by displaying positive testimonials that prompt interaction when customers leave reviews.

Let’s consider the same hotel again—the business can showcase its remarkable service by compiling all the best reviews, thus creating a captivating story for its brand.

These encouraging testimonials will increase customer satisfaction and confidence and draw in new business when posted across social media or the company website.

Check out this example from a Dubai hotel:

Furthermore, a review aggregator can assist in spotting patterns in consumer feedback, allowing companies to interact with clients proactively, respond to issues, and create a feeling of community—all of which reinforce the relationship between the business and its customers.

What are the limitations of review sites and aggregators?

Review aggregators have some limitations, including but not limited to the following:

Occasional fake reviews

Fake reviews on review aggregator sites are a major drawback. Even with measures taken to verify users, skewed or fake reviews still get through. This damages the platform’s reputation and may mislead potential customers, which might hurt the business they were considering.

Limited scope

Many reviews are written by customers who have utilized the product or service properly, which leads to reviews that don’t give a complete picture of the benefits or limitations of the product. Users may overlook features, functions, or subtleties that can greatly impact people’s choices.

Limited sample size

Some niche markets or products may also deal with a limited sample size of reviews, which is inadequate to determine the consensus about a business. A lack of reviews from different demographics might distort the perception of the product’s quality.

Reliance on third-party vendors

Review aggregators frequently get their data from outside service providers—a dependence that may cause disparities in the provided information. These suppliers may also change their algorithms, rules, or data-gathering techniques, thus impacting the consistency and quality of reviews.

Biased user reviews

Users typically write reviews after a very happy or terrible experience, which skews their opinions about the product or service. This bias can provide a misleading perception, making it difficult for customers to evaluate the product impartially based on user reviews.

5 best review aggregators

Now, let’s explore the platforms shaping how we navigate consumer feedback, ensuring the most comprehensive and up-to-date information backs your decisions. While we have a comprehensive text for the 7 best review platforms for 2023 , here’s a brief sneak peek:

EmbedReviews

EmbedReviews is a comprehensive online reviews management tool that automatically generates all of your customer reviews and displays them on your website as a review widget.

Powered by AI algorithms, EmbedReviews can integrate every type of review you can think of, including Facebook reviews, Google reviews, email testimonials, review forms, etc.

It has a very overfull integration with Google’s API, and it can not just generate the reviews published on your Google My Business profile but also provide the potions to respond to reviews from its dashboard.

Additionally, you can use 50+ review widgets from its robust widget templates library. To get started and embed your new Google reviews widget, choose the one that most fits your brand:

Google Reviews Slider

Embed Google reviews in a slider.

Google Reviews Feed

Show reviews in a full-page feed.

Google Reviews Popup

Display Google reviews in a popover widget.

Google Reviews Carousel

Show Google reviews in a modern carousel.

Google CTA Widget

Add buy buttons to your shop on your Google reviews widget.

Google Single Carousel

Show reviews in a large , single slide carousel.

Want more Google reviews widgets? Click below to explore more templates.

Pro plan – $29 per month

Pro Plus plan – $49 per month

Premium plan – $99 per month

Enterprise plan – custom price based on the number of review sources

Collect reviews, feedback, and display testimonials widgets at scale !

Use complete reviews management software to generate and display Google reviews widgets on your website.

Birdeye is a SaaS platform that gathers real-time customer sentiment, ratings, and feedback from every channel, including social media, review sites, and surveys.

In a world where customer reviews are scattered across multiple platforms, businesses constantly struggle to manage their online reputation. Birdeye, as an advanced reviews aggregator, offers a streamlined solution to this problem.

It’s a comprehensive platform that goes beyond collecting reviews. It offers extensive tools for reputation management, customer experience improvement, and even social media integration.

Pricing: Customers fill out a pricing configurator for a customized pricing quote.

Podium is a lead conversion platform that assists companies in managing client connections and establishing an online presence via various tools, including text messaging.

Podium makes review monitoring and management easy by combining customer interactions and internet reviews into a single location. You may communicate with existing and potential clients through text messaging, issue review invites, see customer concerns, and instantly reply to them.

Pricing: Free trial available; paid plans start at $249.

NiceJob assists businesses in tracking sales, referrals, and reviews. It has good and poor review management , an email and SMS request system, and a review monitoring system.

The platform’s underlying technology distributes reviews from local listings to several online destinations while also automating gathering reviews from your company listings.

Pricing: Depends on the number of customers you serve and starts at $75/month for up to 2,500 customers.

Capterra functions as a specialized reviews aggregator for business software and SaaS products, offering verified reviews and detailed analytics.

In the vast landscape of online reviews, Capterra is a good choice if you are looking fo a niche reviews aggregator focusing on software products. Unlike generic review platforms, Capterra provides a niche service catering to software vendors and consumers looking for the best software solutions.

Pricing : Capterra operates on a pay-per-click (PPC) model for software vendors. This means you pay a specific amount each time a potential customer clicks on your product listing. The cost per click can vary depending on the software category and competition level. It also provides a free basic listing to collect customer reviews but doesn’t have the options like other review aggregators to get reviews from other major review sites.

Key takeaways

Review aggregators empower consumers, providing a consolidated view of products and services . By accessing diverse opinions from multiple sources, individuals can make well-informed decisions, ensuring their choices align perfectly with their needs and preferences.

For businesses, review aggregators serve as vital tools in managing online reputation effectively . By promptly addressing feedback and showcasing positive experiences, businesses can enhance their brand image, fostering trust and loyalty among their customer base.

By leveraging the data from review aggregators, companies can refine their products or services, ensuring they meet market demands effectively. This data-driven approach positions businesses ahead of competitors and aids in strategic decision-making.

Consumers and businesses alike should be aware of the limitations of review aggregators , such as occasional fake reviews, limited scope, and biased user opinions. Acknowledging these constraints ensures a more critical evaluation of the information presented.

Platforms that offer comprehensive, unbiased, and context-rich reviews, such as EmbedReviews , stand out. By embracing these platforms, consumers can confidently navigate the market, while businesses can harness the insights to thrive in a competitive environment.

FAQs about review aggregators

How can startups leverage review aggregators for growth.

Review aggregators are effective tools that startups may use to gain the trust of prospective clients, as they can boost their online reviews, draw in new business, and promote sustainable growth in the early growth phases by encouraging happy customers to post good reviews.

Are review scores consistent across different aggregators?

The consistency of review scores varies throughout various aggregators. Differences in the sources, methods, and criteria each aggregator uses may cause variations. In addition, different audiences may have different expectations, which can affect how reviews are assessed and combined.

Why are review aggregators Important for businesses?

These platforms collect reviews from various sources and present them consolidated, making it easier for businesses and consumers to get a holistic view.

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CEO of EmbedSocial 

Nikola Bojkov is the CEO of EmbedSocial, an entrepreneur who turns problems into products. With over a decade of hands-on experience with social media APIs, he guides EmbedSocial in its role as a technical partner for both SMEs and large agencies, maximizing the impact of their user-generated content. EmbedSocial has offices in Skopje, Tokyo and Lisbon with over 250,000 users.

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Review Aggregators: Everything You Wanted to Know

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In today’s digital age, consumers have access to more information than ever before, and they rely heavily on reviews when making purchasing decisions. This is where review aggregators come in. Review aggregators are websites that collect reviews from various sources and display them in one place for easy access by consumers. They have become increasingly important for businesses in all industries as they provide a platform for customers to share their experiences and feedback.

In this post, we’ll dive deeper into the world of review aggregators and explore why they are crucial for businesses looking to build their online reputation and attract more customers. So, let’s get started and discover the power of review aggregators!

What are review aggregators?

Review aggregators are online platforms that collect and compile reviews from various sources about a product, service, or business. These sources include social media platforms, business directories, and other review websites.

Review aggregators gather information through various means, such as web crawling and user submissions, and then display the reviews in one place for easy access. They use algorithms to analyze the reviews and present them in a way that makes it easy for consumers to read and compare.

Some popular review aggregators include Yelp, TripAdvisor, Google My Business, and Consumer Reports. These platforms allow consumers to share their experiences and opinions about businesses, products, and services, and provide a valuable resource for other consumers looking to make informed decisions. Review aggregators have become an essential tool for consumers and businesses by collecting and displaying reviews.

Why are review aggregators important for businesses?

Review aggregators are vital for businesses because they help build their online reputation and influence consumer behavior.

Here are some reasons why they are crucial for businesses.

• Increase visibility: Review aggregators make it easier for potential customers to find your business and increase your online presence.
• Build credibility: Reviews from customers can help build credibility and establish trust with potential customers.
• Identify areas of improvement: Reviews can highlight areas where businesses need to improve, which can lead to better customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Attract new customers: Positive reviews can attract new customers and drive sales.

Can review aggregators can help with reputation management?

Review aggregators provide a platform for businesses to manage their online reputation. By responding to reviews, businesses can show that they value customer feedback and are committed to addressing customer concerns. Professionally addressing negative reviews can also help mitigate any damage to a business’s reputation.

How do review aggregators impact consumer behavior?

Consumers heavily rely on reviews when making purchasing decisions. In fact, a study by BrightLocal found that 93% of consumers read online reviews before making a purchase. Positive reviews can influence a consumer’s decision to choose one business over another, while negative reviews can deter potential customers.

Review aggregators provide a centralized location for consumers to read and compare reviews, making informed decisions easier.

To sum it up, review aggregators are essential for businesses because they help build their online reputation, attract new customers, and influence consumer behavior. By utilizing review aggregators, businesses can take control of their online reputation and stay ahead of the competition.

How do review aggregators impact SEO?

Review aggregators can have a significant impact on a website’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in several ways:

Improve a website’s SEO

• Increase traffic: Review aggregators can help drive traffic to a business’s website through backlinks from their review profiles.
• Boost search rankings: Positive reviews can improve a website’s search ranking, as search engines consider reviews to be a ranking factor.
• Increase click-through rates: Positive reviews can also increase click-through rates, as consumers are more likely to click on businesses with higher ratings and reviews.

Generate more user-generated content

A reviews aggregator exists to generate more user-generated content, which significantly improves a website’s SEO.

User-generated content like reviews can provide fresh and relevant content that search engines prioritize. Additionally, reviews can generate long-tail keywords and phrases that can help improve a website’s search rankings.

You can write reviews on these review sites, allowing businesses to analyze reviews with their business software.

Reviews aggregator platforms come in many forms:

• car reviews
• mobile apps
• restaurant reviews

Help with local SEO

Review aggregators can also help with local SEO, which is essential for businesses with a physical location. Businesses can appear in local search results by having a profile on review aggregators, making it easier for potential customers to find them.

Additionally, reviews on these platforms can help businesses rank higher in local search results, as search engines consider local reviews to be a crucial ranking factor.

In conclusion, review aggregators can significantly impact a website’s SEO by driving traffic, boosting search rankings, and generating user-generated content. Additionally, they can help businesses improve their local SEO and increase their online presence, making them more visible to potential customers.

What are the limitations of review aggregators?

While review aggregators offer many benefits for businesses, there are also some limitations to relying solely on them:

Limitations of relying solely on review aggregators

• Limited sample size: Review aggregators only represent a portion of a business’s customer base. Not all customers leave reviews, so the opinions on the platform may not be representative of all customers.
• Potential for fake reviews: Review aggregators are susceptible to fake reviews, which can skew the ratings and mislead potential customers.
• Limited scope: Review aggregators may not include all aspects of a business, such as a customer service or product quality, which can affect a customer’s overall experience.

Review aggregators may not represent all customers

Review aggregators may not be representative of all customers since not all customers leave reviews. Those who do leave reviews may have different motivations or experiences than those who do not. As a result, review aggregator ratings may not accurately reflect the sentiments of the entire customer base.

Review aggregators may not accurately reflect the quality of a business

While review aggregators provide valuable insights into a business’s reputation, they may not accurately reflect the quality of a business. For example, a business may have high ratings but offer limited services or products, while another business with lower ratings may offer a broader range. In such cases, review aggregator ratings may not accurately represent the quality of the business.

While review aggregators offer valuable insights into a business’s reputation, they should not be the sole factor in evaluating a business. Consumers should consider multiple sources of information, including personal experiences and recommendations from trusted sources, to make informed decisions.

Similarly, businesses should use review aggregators as a tool to improve their online reputation but should not rely solely on them to assess their overall quality.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do review aggregators collect and display reviews from multiple sources.

Review aggregators use web crawlers to extract review data from various sources such as social media platforms, business directories, and review websites. They then aggregate the data and display it in a single location, making it easier for users to compare and evaluate businesses.

Can businesses respond to reviews on review aggregator sites?

Yes, most review aggregator sites allow businesses to respond to reviews. Responding to reviews shows that the business values customer feedback and is committed to improving its products or services. It also provides an opportunity for businesses to address any negative comments and turn a negative experience into a positive one.

How do review aggregator sites prevent fake reviews?

Review aggregator sites use various methods to prevent fake reviews, such as implementing algorithms that detect fraudulent behavior and manually employing human moderators to review suspicious reviews.

How do review aggregator sites impact local SEO?

Review aggregator sites can impact local SEO by increasing the number of online reviews for a business. Search engines take into account the quantity and quality of reviews when ranking local businesses in search results. Having a strong presence on review aggregator sites can improve a business’s online reputation and visibility in local search results.

Are review aggregator ratings the only factor that search engines use to rank businesses?

No, search engines use various factors to rank businesses in search results, such as the relevance of the business to the search query, the business’s location, and the quality of its website. While review aggregator ratings can play a role in local SEO, they are not the only factor that search engines use to determine a business’s ranking.

Review aggregators are a crucial tool for businesses in today’s digital landscape. They offer many benefits, such as improving a business’s online reputation, driving traffic to their website, and boosting their search rankings as well as collecting reviews. However, relying solely on review aggregators can have limitations, such as limited sample size and potential for fake reviews. As a result, businesses should use review aggregators as part of their overall strategy for managing their online reputation. 

We encourage readers to use review aggregators as part of their business strategy, but also to consider other sources of information and not rely solely on review aggregator ratings when evaluating a business. By using review aggregators in conjunction with other methods, businesses can improve their online reputation and ultimately drive more success.

If you want to boost your business’s visibility in local search results, there’s no getting around local link building. That’s because local SEO marketing efforts

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The Best RSS Feed Readers for Streamlining the Internet

Whether you are sick of social media, want to get away from endless notifications, or just want to read your news all in one spot, an RSS reader can help. RSS stands for “really simple syndication.” It's a protocol that allows an RSS reader to talk to your favorite websites and get updates from them. Instead of visiting 10 sites to see what's new, you view a single page with all new content.

There are two parts to RSS: the RSS reader and the feeds from your favorite websites. RSS has been around awhile now, so there are a lot of very good RSS readers out there. Most of them feature built-in search and suggestions, so you don't have to go hunting for feeds yourself. You just might discover some cool new sites to read.

I've been using RSS for two decades and have used and tested dozens of RSS reader services. The picks below are the best RSS feed readers available.

Updated April 2024: We've updated our reviews to include new features from Inoreader, Feedly, Newsblur, and Feedbin. We’ve also added a section about how we tested.

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Inoreader offers a well-designed interface, good search and discovery options, and a nice set of features that are beginner-friendly and offer plenty of advanced functionality for power users. There's a web interface as well as iOS and Android apps. The reading experience is good, with a clean, uncluttered design for both the web and mobile apps. Web users get keyboard shortcuts and plenty of customization options. Inoreader handles more than just RSS feeds—you can add email newsletters, Facebook pages, X searches, podcasts, Telegram channels, even Bluesky feeds.

Advanced users will like extra features like keyword monitoring, which was recently expanded to what Inoreader calls Monitoring Feeds. You can use monitoring feeds to consolidate articles about a particular subject from the various feeds you already follow, and you could, as I do, monitor the entire internet for articles that match whatever search terms you put in (similar to what Google News alerts do). Inoreader will search for those terms and create a feed of just those articles. You can also do the opposite and hide articles matching a phrase.

Inoreader also offers a nice automation system you can use to create rules and filter your feeds, giving some higher priority. For example, you could get a push notification every time WIRED publishes a new review, but not the rest of our content.

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The automation requires a pro account, which also provides some other standout features well worth paying for, like the ability to fetch full articles, integrate with IFTTT and Zapier, read offline, and my favorite: keeping your YouTube account in sync with your RSS reading. You can watch YouTube videos in Inoreader, and next time you log into YouTube you won't have a ton of unwatched videos.

You can share articles via social media, and you can use the Inoreader browser plug-in to save articles you find around the web (sort of like Instapaper or Pocket).

Inoreader offers a free (with ads) account, which is good for testing whether the service meets your needs. If it does, we recommend the Pro account ($7.50/month, billed annually) , which brings more advanced features and support for more feeds.

Feedly desktop and mobile apps

Feedly is probably the most popular RSS reader on the web. It's well-designed and easy to use, and it offers great search options so it's easy to add all your favorite sites. It lacks one thing that makes Inoreader slightly better for my use—the YouTube syncing—but otherwise Feedly is an excellent choice.

Feedly has some nice additional features like Evernote integration (you can save articles to Evernote) and a notes feature for jotting down your thoughts on stories. Feedly also has an AI search assistant, which can help filter your feeds and surface the content you really want. I found that it worked well enough, but a big part of what I like about RSS is that there's no AI—I don't want automated filtering. Depending on how you use RSS, though, this could be a useful feature.

Like the others here, Feedly offers iOS and Android apps along with a web interface. Feedly is free up to 100 feeds. A Pro subscription is $8 a month (cheaper if you pay for a year) and enables more features like notes, save to Evernote, and ad-free reading. The Pro+ account gets you the AI-features, a way to search your feeds, follow newsletters like RSS feeds, and more for $12 a month.

Newsblur is a refreshingly simple old-school RSS reader. You won't find AI features mucking about in your feeds—it's for reading the news you aggregate and getting on with your life. It can subscribe to all kinds of content (including newsletters and YouTube), read full stories (even from RSS feeds that don't offer them), integrate with IFTTT, and even track story changes if a publisher updates an article.

One thing that sets Newsblur apart is that it's open source. You can see the code on Github, and if you're comfortable with the command line you can even set up your own self-hosted version of Newsblur on your own server.

There are apps for iOS and Android , as well as the web-based interface. Reading on the iPad is particularly nice with Newsblur. Newsblur's free account is the most limited of the options here, with only 64 feeds and only five stories from each at a time, but the Premium account is also the cheapest at $36 per year. That gets you access to all the features and unlimited feeds and keeps Lyric, the Newsblur dog, from going hungry.

Feedbin is an elegant little RSS reader that's great for everyone, but design lovers will especially appreciate the customization via themes (with Hoefler & Co. typefaces!) and the attention to detail in the user interface. As with the others here, there are plenty of features that go well beyond RSS to pull in your YouTube subscriptions, newsletters, and even Twitter feeds. Feedbin will also let you read full-text stories even from RSS feeds that don't offer them.

Earlier this year Feedbin added a feature that I really like: the ability to find and fix broken news feeds. In many RSS readers you would never know if a feed was broken or if the source just hadn't published anything recently. Both look the same from the user’s point of view—there's nothing new to read. With Feedbin's new feature the service will detect broken feeds and search the site to see if perhaps it just moved. If Feedbin finds the feed it will offer to replace the broken one.

Overall, Feedbin is a simple, clean RSS experience with everything you need and no cruft. I particularly like that while Feedbin has its own iOS app, it will work with quite a few third-party iOS and Android apps . Even the pricing is simple. Feedbin offers a 14-day free trial period; after that it's $5 per month.

The Vivaldi web browser, which I've elsewhere called the web's best browser , has a built-in RSS reader. The Vivaldi feed reader uses the also-new Vivaldi Mail to display and manage feed items, which end up looking a bit like your email. There's no sync to mobile, which is a big limitation for some users, but you can import and export your feeds via an OPML file.

I really like how Vivaldi handles YouTube videos, which are extracted using a no-cookie URL and displayed inline rather than linking to the video, a small win for privacy. Vivaldi also supports podcast subscriptions and offers an embedded player, so you can listen to them in the background while you browse the web.

My favorite feature is how tightly the RSS integrates into the browsing experience. When you're on a webpage with a feed, you'll get an icon in the address field, and you can click that to see a preview of the feed. Click the Subscribe button, and it'll be added to your feeds.

Vivaldi's RSS reader doesn't handle some of the extras that other services do, like newsletters and Facebook pages. If you just want a simple reader to subscribe to a few feeds and you don't need a mobile client or all the bells and whistles, this is a great choice. Vivaldi's RSS reader is free and built-in to the Vivaldi web browser.

The first thing you'll notice when you get into RSS is that not every website advertises its feed. More often than not there is a feed, but finding it can be tricky. Fortunately, there are some web browser extensions that can help. This Chrome extension and this Firefox add-on will add an RSS feed icon to your URL bar, and you can click it to subscribe to almost any website you're on.

Some websites don't have RSS feeds. In that case, you can use a feed generator like Fetch RSS or RSS.app . Neither are perfect, but in my testing both were able to generate feeds for seven of the 10 pages I tested, which is better than nothing.

What about those really stubborn pages? Well, I just ignore them. There's a saying that “networks route around damage,” and not having an RSS feed is a kind of damage. Ignoring those websites is a way to route around it.

I use RSS every day. I probably would not be able to do my job at WIRED without RSS. To test RSS readers I take my OPML file of feeds that I monitor and import it into each service and spend a month or two living with it. I test search features and any generated RSS feeds by subscribing to them elsewhere, and I load in a dozen sites that have no RSS feed, to see how each service handles that. This is where the biggest variation between the options turns up. It's hard to scrape data from a site without an RSS feed (see the section above). Because readers always ask, when I am not testing I use a very, very simple RSS reader called Newsboat , which runs in a terminal window. It has almost none of the features most people will want, but it is very fast and fits well in my workflow. I have been using it ever since Google Reader was shut down.

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The 8 Best Gaming News Sites and Game Review Sites

These are the best gaming websites for video game reviews and news that won't waste your time with unrelated nonsense.

Hundreds of video games get released every year, and there's not enough time to play them all. How are you supposed to know which games are worth your time? Video game news and reviews sites are a good way to keep up with what's happening in the gaming world and see if the latest releases are worth buying.

We've picked out the best game review sites and video game news sites on the internet to help with this. Whether you want to check on a game's quality before buying it, or just want to browse the latest gaming headlines, one of these great game websites will serve you well.

A Word on Mainstream Gaming Sites

Video games journalism has gone through a lot of problems in the past decade. We'll spare specific details here, but suffice it to say that several well-known video game websites have suffered major breaches of ethics: collusion, undisclosed financial ties, and cronyism, among other behaviors.

Additionally, for many gaming sites, the focus has shifted away from reviewing games based primarily on their gameplay and quality. Now, some sites emphasize social and political issues above all else, or even have authors who treat some articles like their personal blog. Other gaming sites have branched out to cover other forms of entertainment (like movies, TV, and music) to the detriment of their gaming coverage.

We encourage you to research these issues and draw your own conclusions about whether you want to follow such mainstream gaming sites. Whatever sites you do choose to read, it's important that you pay attention to the writers you're reading, not just the site. There really isn't a "best game review site" for everyone, since quality differs among the authors at various sites.

1. Destructoid

Destructoid is a great all-around gaming site with a bit of everything. It publishes articles regularly, with lots of news posts, reviews, and features appearing each week. This includes updates on certain games, previews of upcoming games, and opinion pieces.

It's not just a gaming news site, though. Destructoid publishes reviews of console and PC games, as well as mobile titles and even DLC. Its reviews are straightforward, and you can read Destructoid's scoring system to understand how it rates games.

Top off this coverage with video content and community forums, and you've got a solid video game website anyone can enjoy.

2. GamesRadar+

Another gaming news site that offers a healthy balance of content, GamesRadar+ provides news, reviews, features, hands-on looks at new games, and more. You can view reviews and guides for games on your favorite system, or check out the latest news and reviews.

GamesRadar+ doesn't review the volume of games many other sites do. At the time of writing, the site's latest batch of reviews includes a few big-name games, but are mostly hardware reviews. This shows that the staff takes their time and doesn't rush out reviews.

In the reviews, clear Pros / Cons lists and a summary of the verdict make them easy to skim. Overall, GamesRadar+ provides lots of content to check out, as well as quick stories for staying abreast of gaming news.

3. Game Informer

Game Informer is a long-running video game magazine that also has a website. Unlike other gaming websites that also feature content for movies and TV, this one is all about games (occasionally covering movies and TV based on games). You'll find news, previews of upcoming games, reviews, and features.

It's an old-school take on a game website in the overcomplicated modern age, which is welcome. Many of the staff are longtime game players, and the site has a professional feel to it. It summarizes its reviews with a number, which not all gaming sites do nowadays.

Overall, Game Informer is a website run by people who love video games, built for players. The site doesn't review every little game, but what's here is excellent and there's no political nonsense to worry about.

4. Metacritic

If you don't feel like wading through detailed reviews and just want a quick score to see if a game is worth playing, Metacritic is for you. It's not a review website in itself, but instead aggregates scores from various game review websites ( making it an aggregate review site like Rotten Tomatoes ).

Search for a game, and you'll see a weighted score from 1-100. You can click through to read individual reviews, or compare what the critics thought to user reviews.

A lot of the time, it's hard to sum up a game's quality in a single number. Thus, many people have issues with the weight placed on Metacritic, but it's a fine place to start your research on a game. Just remember that a numbered score isn't everything. Consider OpenCritic as an alternative, which addresses some of the problems people have with Metacritic.

5. Nintendo Life

As its name suggests, this is one of the best gaming websites for Nintendo enthusiasts. Nintendo Life specializes in covering the Nintendo Switch, eShop, and similar topics. You'll find reviews, news, features, and even original videos.

The guides stand out here. They provide help for major games, such as type weaknesses in Pokémon or how to spot fake paintings in Animal Crossing. The site reviews downloadable eShop titles as well as mainstream releases, so there's a lot of coverage.

With a pleasant community in the forums and comment sections, this is a must-visit for all Nintendo fans. For similar sites in the same network, check out Push Square (PlayStation) and Pure Xbox .

6. GameSpot

GameSpot is a well-known gaming site that's worth a visit. You'll find popular and recent news on its homepage, along with lists of upcoming games and recent reviews.

The site reviews games, both popular and small, on every platform. For something a little different, you can also check out its video shows and forums to connect with other gamers .

There are some occasional quirks with its reviews, like the writer mentioning that they didn't play through the entire game. Because of this, it is nice to see a summary of what the reviewer played at the bottom of the article. But overall, it's a quality resource.

7. Christ Centered Gamer

With the above discussion of bias in games media, you might think a site with an obvious predisposition is an odd choice to include. But Christ Centered Gamer has received praise for its clear reviews from people concerned about the ethics of mainstream game sites.

Unlike sites that let author biases influence their ranking of a game's quality, this site separates its reviews into two scores. One scores the game technically on its gameplay, controls, and other qualities. The other scores the morality of the game, based on factors like language, sexual content, and similar.

If you're a person of faith, or want more information about video games for your children beyond the basic game age rating , you can take the morality score into account. But if you don't care about that, you can skip right past it and still enjoy a quality review of the game on its own merits.

This page isn't as well-known as some other game review sites, but it's up-front about its biases and hasn't had concerning breaches of ethics. You may find that refreshing.

8. Game Rant

Game Rant has been a trusted source of gaming information for over ten years. As one of the 250+ million readers of the site , you can access the latest news, reviews, features, interviews, and opinion pieces on everything related to gaming. For instance, you can read game reviews (each game is scored on a scale of 5 stars) and explainers on a wide variety of games, from AAA blockbusters to indie gems.

You can start by keeping an eye on the latest game releases and developments on the site's Gaming News page. Platformers of all types can get something as Game Rant comprehensively covers PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo, & mobile titles. If you are a beginner, the detailed Explainers on each game title can not only help you learn about different games but also make informed decisions about which games to buy.

Websites for User-Written Game Reviews

The above sites are all professional publications for game news and reviews. However, don't forget that there are tons of resources online to read user-created reviews too. Since opinions on games are subjective, you might prefer to read several reviews from everyday players in addition to, or instead of, professional articles.

Anyone with an opinion and a YouTube channel can make a video reviewing a game. If you prefer to watch gameplay for a game instead of just reading about it, this is a great option. Chances are that you'll be able to find someone talking about the game you're interested in. Have a look at the best YouTube game review channels to start.

In addition to being one of the best places for game walkthroughs , GameFAQs is a useful resource for user reviews of games too. Search for a game and check its Reviews tab to see what others thought about it.

These reviews don't follow any particular pattern, so it's up to each person to discuss what they feel is important and structure the review accordingly.

Steam has a handy review system that makes it easy to see what a lot of other players thought about the game. Just scroll down on any game's page on Steam to take a look. You can filter by positive or negative reviews, how long the reviewer played the game, and other criteria. It's even possible to see a graph of reviews over time.

A lot of games feature "funny" reviews, which aren't useful, but you can filter some of those out with Steam's tools. Others can give awards for reviews, and the most helpful ones rise to the top. Even if you don't play on PC, checking Steam reviews for any game that you're interested in is a helpful resource.

The Top Video Game Websites Worth Your Time

The best video game websites aren't necessarily the ones you hear about often. Many game websites have major drawbacks—whether it's a lack of ethics, poorly justified review scores, or a radical bias. But these sites are great places to get your video game reviews, as well as some news.

In addition to these options, it's a good idea to find some Twitch streamers that you enjoy. Game websites employ dozens of people, which makes it difficult to find a consistent voice. With a single streamer, you can understand their preferences and better see if a game is right for you. Plus, seeing a game in real-time for yourself always helps.

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The 10 Best News Aggregators of 2024

Get political, entertainment, sports, and other news all in one place

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Millions of people use news aggregators daily to catch up on what's happening worldwide, but which ones are worth your time? Here are 10 of the best news aggregator apps you should check out.

Best News Aggregator for No-Nonsense Reporting: AP News

Its no-nonsense approach to news reporting.

Photo galleries are beautiful.

It's a bit plain compared to other apps on this list (except for the gorgeous photo galleries).

While various news outlets have mobile apps, AP News is the place to go if you're looking for the facts. The Associated Press is an independent, nonprofit news cooperative providing content to other outlets. The organization has won 52 Pulitzer Prizes since the award was established in 1917.

Although the app isn't as fancy as others on this list, it's clean, readable, and full of beautiful photo galleries from the AP's award-winning photojournalists.

Download For:

Best News Aggregator for In-Depth Reporting: Google News

The personal briefing provides a concise snapshot of the day's big news stories.

Polished format.

Easy to subscribe to publications you like.

Not every article in your feed will be relevant to your interests.

Google Reader might be gone, but the technology behemoth still has a popular news aggregator in the form of Google News. Like other apps on this list, it pulls thousands of articles from credible online news organizations, blogs, and magazines and presents them in a polished format.

Google News gives you the option to set up a personal briefing that updates throughout the day with relevant stories, or you can choose to get full coverage about a topic, including different perspectives, a timeline of key events, and more.

Additionally, Google makes it easy to subscribe to newspapers and magazines with a single tap, so you can support the publications you love.

Best Aggregator for a Balanced Perspective: SmartNews

SmartView mode for people with slower connections.

Get top trending news stories from around the word.

Colorful, simple interface.

Emphasizes discovery over personalization, so you may see stories you're not interested in.

SmartNews claims to analyze millions of articles every day to deliver the top trending news stories from around the world. It favors discovery over personalization, offering a "both sides" perspective to the latest trending topics. Users can then choose channels, which are articles grouped by publications or by themes like Politics, Science, or Entertainment, and how often they receive headlines as notifications.

The app's interface is simple, yet colorful, and its SmartView mode promises to tune out distractions and improve readability, a handy feature for people with slower connections.

Best Aggregator (Likely) Already Installed: Apple News

Like most Apple products, it looks great.

Articles optimized for your platform.

Save articles for offline viewing.

Easily find, download, and manage your subscriptions and issues.

Like most Apple products, it's hampered by being part of a closed ecosystem.

Apple News comes preloaded on every iOS device, so it's a good place to start if you're an iPhone or iPad owner looking to catch up on the day's news. The app features a clean format with beautiful photography, and articles are optimized for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, so readers are guaranteed a good reading experience on any device.

Apple News offers a wide selection of news organizations and indie publications, and Apple promises it will get better at understanding a user's interests the more they use it. It also features a daily, curated digest and the ability to save articles for offline viewing.

With the iOS 14.5 update, Apple News introduced a streamlined search function to make it easier to find the topics, channels, and stories that interest you.

Best for Saving Your Favorite News Articles: Pocket

Bookmarks online articles.

Makes recommendations based on your interests.

Share stories easily.

It's missing some notable categories like Sports and Politics.

Pocket is a great tool for bookmarking and managing lists of internet articles you want to read later, and it's also a good place to find stories. All you do is select the Recommended or Explore links to find a variety of trending articles on the Pocket network. Recommendations are partly based on previous articles you saved, so there's a good chance you'll find something matching your interests.

Pocket is available for mobile and web browsers, and it's integrated into over 500 applications, which makes it simple to save and share your favorite stories.

Prettiest News Aggregator: Flipboard

Its magazine-style format is beautiful to look at.

Creates personalized digital magazines.

Wide swath of topics to choose from.

Coverage of trending stories can get repetitive.

Flipboard is a popular news aggregator known for its lovely magazine-style layout. Available via web browsers or on iOS and Android, it takes content from news sources and social media, presents it as a personalized digital magazine, and lets users "flip" through it.

Flipboard claims to offer a "curated experience with a plurality of voices," meaning odds are good you'll find something worth reading every time you open the app.

Best News Aggregator With a Sense of Humor: Fark

Quirky headlines.

Find news stories you may not see anywhere else.

There's currently no Android version.

Fark is a good place to find news of a more peculiar variety. Created by Drew Curtis in 1999, community members submit potential news stories to the website on a daily basis, and the Fark team chooses around 100 to display on the homepage. Articles are categorized with tags like Awkward, Creepy, Ironic, or Florida.

Fark is further broken up over several tabs for Entertainment, Sports, Politics, and more. There's also a mobile app called Hey! On Fark.com for iOS. However, Android users will have to stick with the mobile version of the website for now.

Social News Aggregator With an Active Community: Reddit

Active community for practically any topic.

Contribute your own photos, memes, and stories.

Tailor your news feed.

Toxic political forums.

Yes, Reddit has a reputation for housing some terrible internet content, but there's good there as well. If you're looking for a blend of interesting news, memes, and community chat, it's worth checking out.

Tailor your news feed by subscribing to various subreddits or contribute your own photos, memes, and stories. Reddit has a pretty engaged community, meaning there's always something worth reading or discussing. Plus, the official app offers some new features like community group chat, a night mode, and more.

Best Aggregator for Foreign Language Articles: Inoreader

Article translations are a nice feature for people who read a lot of international news.

Save articles to Dropbox or Evernote.

Puts some features behind a paywall.

Inoreader is an RSS reader with a vibrant community of content curators, a Discovery mode, user-generated subscription bundles, and more.

It offers a free plan where people can subscribe to unlimited news feeds and folders and read them on any device. There are also day and night reading modes, free search and archiving of all your subs, and the ability to save articles to third-party tools like Dropbox or Evernote.

The upgraded Pro plan is paid for and includes push notifications, offline mode, article translation, and more.

Best News Aggregator With Cloud Sync: Feedly

Works across a variety of platforms and browsers.

Works on browsers, iOS, and Android.

Hide unwanted topics or keywords.

It's less user-friendly than other apps on this list.

Available for browsers, iOS, and Android, Feedly lets you subscribe to content feeds from websites covering a wide range of topics from sports to politics to entertainment. It has multiple layout options, tagging, keyboard shortcuts, and more. A mute filters feature lets you fine-tune your feeds by hiding unwanted topics or keywords.

Best of all, its cloud-syncing feature lets you save and read articles across devices or share them on social media, so you'll never be without something to read whether you're at home or on the go.

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8 Great News Aggregator Websites You Should Check Out (Plus How to Build Your Own)

Let’s agree that the information age can be overwhelming without news aggregator websites. Not only is there a lot of information in total, but it is also scattered all over the web. In order to save time, you can bring all of the news, updates, insights, tips, guides, articles into one location with content aggregators.

This article is a deep dive into news aggregator websites to highlight their diversity and how they all convert into value for both users and publishers. Along the way, I’ll share some great examples with a dedicated section for some of the top news aggregator websites for 2023.

🤓 These inspiring examples will be a great motivation to build our own aggregator site with WordPress. So in the final sections, I’ll run through all the steps you need to start aggregating content today.

Let’s do this!

What is a content aggregator site?

A content aggregator site collects information from all over the web and posts it in one location for visitors to access. The topics are created around various keywords using RSS feeds. A content aggregator site will often provide attribution and a link to the original site to avoid plagiarism claims.

Some of the news aggregator sites allow you to follow your favorite publications, too. This way, you make sure you get more content from the websites you trust in your feed. However, a publication needs to own a profile on a news aggregator site in order for you to find it there.

There are a few different ways for an aggregator site to operate, but, generally, they don’t produce content of their own.

Creators can also pay to have their content aggregated and distributed more widely among larger websites. Syndication is a particularly popular news aggregator business model because it helps publishers remove the hard work of negotiating and securing distribution.

There is an incredible diversity among aggregator websites. We have pure news aggregators like News 360 , but we also have more niche publications, such as the poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight . You can even collect the best search results from multiple search engines with Dogpile , or display all social media feeds with a social network aggregator like Curator .

What is the benefit of a content aggregator site?

Users appreciate a widely sourced aggregator site because it removes the tedious search-click-search-click process. There is nothing better than finding a range of views and stories in one place through scrolling.

My favorite example of this is how the aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes helps users by collecting reviews from all over the web. You can read 329 reviews of  The Dark Knight, from both digital media powerhouses to cool blogs, without any effort.

For the publishers, the aggregator sites get their content in front of more readers, and bring more traffic to the origin page.

The best news aggregator websites of 2023

It has to be on top because it is easily one of the best news aggregator websites on the web. With a clean, simple design, Feedly is an excellent way to follow news. I particularly like the vertical organization over the grid organization you find on other sites.

Feedly is fully customizable with both a paid and free aggregator service and an unrivaled range of sources.

The free plan is limited to 100 sources, and the range will get you excited. Feedly aggregates sites from every niche possible. You’ll see knitting, cocktails, JavaScript, and even something for sneakers. If you can think of it, then Feedly have a feed for it.

On top of that, you can also import whatever other RSS source and have it aggregated alongside the big boys. For example, care to add Themeisle’s blog feed there? Use this address: https://themeisle.com/blog/feed/

Feedly in one word: Champion. 🏆

Panda is a great tool for anyone working as a web designer, developer, or who has the entrepreneurial spirit. It is unique among aggregator sites because it follows Dribble, Behance, Product Hunt, GitHub. Not to mention Hacker News. Aggregating the aggregators!

Its interface has more visual appeal than most of the other news aggregator websites on this list. Panda is a free app with a professional look and feel, so you can expect some ads but the trade-off is acceptable.

Panda in one word: Awesome. 🤩

3. Techmeme

A brilliant technology-themed aggregator site that pulls in tech stories from all over the spectrum. It includes sites like Reddit alongside breaking business news.

You’ll see that each article contains access to other sources, as well as the conversation happening on social. There’s a lot happening on the front page and there’s not much padding between the columns.

They also have sister aggregator sites, MediaGazer (media aggregator), Memeorandum (political news aggregator), and WeSmirch (a celebrity content aggregator site).

Techmeme in a word: Oldskool. 🕶️

4. Flipboard

Flipboard is another cool news aggregator website. Its interface gives you the feeling of reading an actual magazine. The platform is super flexible because you can thoroughly filter the topics in your feed to see only content that is relevant to you.

Flipboard is without a doubt one of the best news aggregator websites because you can follow as many worldwide topics and publications as you want. Or, if you want to narrow down your feed to local news, you can search for your country or city and add it to your topics.

What’s awesome about this content aggregator is that you can go from broad to very specific niche topics. Search for any hobby and you will probably find it there!

Moreover, Flipboard lets you interact with the content. You can like, comment, and share the links to social media. You can read news from your web browser and mobile – available on Android and iOS.

Flipboard in a word: Hobbyist. ❤️

5. Metacritic

Full disclosure; Metacritic is one of my favorite news aggregator websites and easily one of the top such sites of all time. It is a review aggregator, like Rotten Tomatoes, but it also includes games and music.

I also included it because I like how they use aggregated content to create meta content like ranking the classic film franchises using the aggregated reviews.

Metacritic oozes professionalism with that awesome organization on the front page. There are a lot of ads, but I like how the categories are repeated in each section making it easy for users to find their way through.

Metacritic in a word: Essential. 🚰

6. (e)Science News

I’m going a little left of field to ensure this is a truly definitive list of aggregator sites. Popular science has never been more deserving of the name, and this aggregator is a good way to stay updated with the breakthroughs.

I love the range of categories, and their location, it is both user friendly and authoritative. There’s also a nice arrangement of articles into popular, latest, and breaking. The front page isn’t too busy and there’s no ads on this one.

(e)Science news in a word: Brainy. 🧠

7. The Morning News

I’ve included this one out of a sense of love. The Morning News is unique in that it only has a single column with news covering a wide variety of topics. The topics are not the usual topics you find on news aggregators with more obscure stories finding their way to the front page.

The sources range from mainstream media to more unusual sources like Reddit. I love the fact that the obscure topics are the driver for the website rather than a blanket approach.

The Morning News is a very well organized website with fewer images used. I like the hand-crafted look to The Morning News with images used on a case by case basis. The text is also selected with the idea of allowing the website room to breathe.

The Morning News in a word: Informative. 🤔

Pocket might be my favorite news aggregator at the moment because it offers me a chance to build an archive of must-read links. With the Pocket button, I can save articles, videos, pages from across the web and then read them on any device. The ability to sync is and view articles from a range of categories makes it a leading aggregator site no matter what your interests are.

One thing that immediately appealed to me was the range of categories from tech through finance to travel. Not only that, but the sources are varied with hand-picked articles regularly finding their way to the top of my feed. Highly customizable with a design and setup that allows the sections foom to breath.

Pocket in a word: Personal. 🤗

How to build your own aggregator site

With the examples of news aggregator websites out of the way, let’s now discuss how to build your own aggregator website on WordPress :

To create an aggregator site, you’ll need at least a few key ingredients:

• Quality hosting
• A good WordPress news aggregator theme
• A WordPress RSS aggregator plugin to import news feeds

Here’s how to do it:

Step 1: Purchase quality hosting and install WordPress

Step 2: choose a wordpress news aggregator theme, step 3: install a wordpress rss aggregator plugin, step 4: extend with additional plugins for social media.

A news aggregation site isn’t especially resource-heavy, but in addition to ensuring a good front-end user experience with fast page load times , your site will be constantly running RSS feed import processes in the background, which makes rock-solid hosting doubly important.

When you’re just getting started with your aggregation website, Bluehost is a good option because it’s affordable (from $2.75 a month) while still scoring highly in various performance tests.

Bluehost also makes it easy for you to get WordPress installed on the server. Frankly, you don’t need to trouble yourself with the installation process at all. Bluehost will set things up for you on their own. When you first log in to your user panel, you’ll have WordPress ready to go.

Next step: choosing a theme for your website.

Your website’s theme dictates how it looks to your visitors. Because you’re aggregating content, rather than producing your own content, your theme needs are a little bit different than the average WordPress user’s.

You’ll want a theme that:

• Is able to display a large number of articles/headlines on the homepage
• Makes it easy for visitors to find different categories

There are a number of WordPress news aggregator themes out there. Here two themes that can help you get started.

Neve is a free theme that makes it easy to display large numbers of articles in a variety of different categories. It also has built-in advertising locations to help you monetize your aggregator site. To make building a site easier, Neve comes with a set of pre-made layouts and page structures.

Extra offers some unique design that can work well for an aggregator site. It’s capable of handling a big volume of content, and presents that content in an appealing way. These are all characteristics that aggregator sites can benefit from. This premium theme is part of the $89 Elegant Themes Membership.

Once you have your theme set up, the next step is to find a way to put your news aggregation on autopilot. The easiest way to do that – and the way other news aggregator websites often do it – is to use a WordPress RSS aggregator plugin to automatically import RSS feeds into your WordPress site.

Most news organizations provide RSS feeds of their content, so by setting up multiple RSS feed imports, you can automatically aggregate news onto your site.

Better yet, with the right syndication plugin , you can also:

• Import RSS feed items as actual WordPress posts
• Use filters to include or exclude feed items that meet certain criteria
• Add different feeds to different categories on your site

To build an aggregator site, we recommend the free Feedzy RSS Lite plugin as well as its premium Feedzy RSS Feeds extension .

Author(s): Themeisle

Current Version: 4.4.8

Last Updated: April 15, 2024

feedzy-rss-feeds.zip

Once you install and activate the plugin, we have a guide on how to use Feedzy to import RSS feed items as WordPress posts .

Basically, you’ll need to complete the process outlined in the guide for each news source that you want to use.

Depending on your goals for your site, you may want to add additional plugins to further enhance the functionality of your website.

Because of how popular news items are on Facebook and Twitter, it might be helpful to integrate your site with Facebook and Twitter to help your readers share the content that they find.

Thanks to Feedzy and WordPress, we’ve made a WordPress aggregator site in a few hours.

The most enjoyable thing is that Feedzy does all of the heavy lifting for us. All we need are the feeds and Feedzy will do the rest.

When you start building your own aggregator site, be sure to find the best hosting for your needs and a theme with the ability to display categories and a large number of articles in a readable fashion. Once you have those elements, you can add Feedzy to the mix and get started.

Side note; did you know there are more ways to use RSS feeds on your WordPress site? Check them out here .

Did you build some news aggregator websites yet? Let us know in the comments.

By Chris Fitzgerald

Themeisle contributor.

I put words into pleasing arrangements for Themeisle, CodeinWP, and ReviveSocial.

Updated on:

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Blog – Posted on Friday, May 01

The best book review sites for enthusiastic readers.

Book lovers, stop us if you’ve heard this one before: you’ve just finished a mind-blowing book and you need to hear some discussion about it. What do you do? Dive straight into the limitless realm of the Internet and search for book review sites, of course. 

Or here’s another scenario: you’ve finished reading a novel and now you’re searching for something to fill the void. Maybe you want more of the same, or maybe something completely different to switch things up. You’ll probably also scour the Internet for ratings and trustworthy recommendations. 

Fortunately, there are endless review blogs and book review sites that you can peruse. Un fortunately, not every one of them features a wide enough variety to help you. But don’t worry: we’ve got you covered with ten of the best book review sites to satisfy the bookworm in you. If you want to cut to the chase and get a personalized pick for a book review site in 30 seconds, we first recommend taking this quick quiz:

Which review community should you join?

Find out which review community is best for your style. Takes 30 seconds!

Then read on for the full explanation of all of the best book review sites out there!

1. Goodreads 

It’s impossible not to mention Goodreads when discussing book communities: it’s the Facebook of book reviews — the ultimate social media platform for bibliophiles. If you’ve somehow managed to go this long without stumbling upon this omnipresent site, here’s the run-down: you can use Goodreads to organize, display, and discuss your virtual bookshelf with other users. 

Goodreads recommendations are based on your listed interests. You can follow authors and book influencers ranging from Celeste Ng to Bill Gates . This allows you to see all their reviews, which vary from compact one-liners to critical analysis, and watch the new reviews roll in. For a quick verdict, just take a look at the star rating that they give the book. 

Also if you like to browse lists, Goodreads compiles the best and most popular books for every genre. There’s also the annual Goodreads’ Choice Awards to celebrate each year’s new releases, where you can cast your vote or peruse the list of contenders to find a new book to read. It’s a site for every kind of reader, with abundant ways to comment and interact. 

2. LibraryThing

This is the OG of all online book catalogues and discussion boards — take a look and you’ll see that it’s an oldie but a goodie. Of course, the basic functions of LibraryThing are rather similar to Goodreads: there are millions of books that readers can add to their lists, as well as review with star ratings.

While the interface harks back to the earlier days of the world wide web, LibraryThing has a secret weapon that’ll appeal to all readers, especially modern ones: their Zeitgeist . This page displays the latest crème de la crème of the whole site, from the most popular books to the hottest reviews , which you can also write with the help of a good book review template . Just a glance shows that the readers here know how to read between the lines and wield their words!

So if you’re hoping to read or share some in-depth literary thoughts with fellow sharp-minded users , LibraryThing is the site to browse. (You can even access it without creating an account!) 

3. Reedsy Discovery 

Now, if you’re searching for some hidden gems to peruse, Reedsy Discovery ’s got your back. While our blog features everything from classics to contemporary hits, Discovery’s specialty is indie publications, many of which are accompanied with succinct comments from experienced reviewers . There’s no better way to broaden your horizon! 

Moreover, if casual and creative reviews are more your cup of tea, then rejoice: the burgeoning community of readers on Discovery can leave comments, one-line reviews, and video reviews (calling all Booktubers!) on just about any book. It’s a fun and interactive way to geek out over your favorite reads and discover all the coolest new titles you won’t find anywhere else.

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4. LoveReading 

Though it’s UK-based, this prolific site caters to audiences around the world. LoveReading is strictly a reviewing site, with a base of staff writers and carefully selected contributors, so you know the reviews are top-notch. The staff often give quite personal reading experiences in their reviews, which make their recommendations very endearing, like they’re from a close friend. They even offer you presents — well, if you think of giveaways as presents! 

LoveReading covers books from every genre you can think of. They also have weekly, monthly, and yearly list features to keep you up to date with the latest stellar releases, so you’ll never be in want of something to pore over. 

5. The Millions 

In search of reviews that really dive into the themes, metaphors, and overall executions of interesting and highbrow books? The Millions has got you covered. 

Written by a collection of seasoned critics, these reviews are speckled with memorable quotes, elegant analysis, and plentiful comparisons to other works — which means extra reading recommendations for you! If contemporary and literary fictions are your go-tos, then The Millions is the site for all your lit nerd needs. 

6. SFBook Reviews 

Those who think quantity and quality don’t go hand in hand, you clearly haven’t encountered SFBook Review . The five reviewers on the team here share two common and important goals: firstly, to follow the outpour of new titles in the sci-fi, fantasy, and horror genres every year, and secondly, to give thoughtful reviews to as many of them as possible.

This team knows their SFF niches inside out, so their verdicts are very credible. Still, their reviews are quite friendly and personal — they discuss other related books and share their reading experiences to help you make your own reading choices. 

7. Bookpage

Bookpage features all kinds of genres: from children’s books to nonfiction, from the works of household names to debut authors, and so much more. Their format is neat and straightforward — they bring you the volumes they think are most worthwhile, recommending them to you by summarizing and concisely commenting on the prose, the theme, and the plot of each chosen book.

In addition to this, Bookpage also features author interviews and articles that unearth the deeper themes and purposes of certain books. If you’re a true book lover seeking like-minded literary aficionados, this may be the perfect place for you.

8. Book Riot 

Avid readers, you’ve probably stumbled upon Book Riot more times than you can remember. While it’s not a site that individually assesses titles, it has lists for everything — from timeless literary giants to the top books in each genre. What’s more, Book Riot has lots of thinkpieces that dive deep into the way certain titles make readers feel — be it exhilarated, motivated, or enraged — and that’s really all you need to know when deciding to embark on a new reading adventure. 

Additionally, if you’d rather listen to discussions and reviews rather than read them, you'll be happy to know that Book Riot has a range of podcasts for you to choose from. 

9. NetGalley 

NetGalley is another platform bringing you new and unconventional recommendations. They specialize in connecting authors who are publishing to readers who’d like to preview and put in their two cents. While the database of books available here are not the most expansive, those that are featured are certainly worth your time. 

Readers can benefit most from NetGalley via their book recommendation site, Bookish , where the staff reviewers update you with their recent reads and in-depth thoughts on those reads. Along with that, Bookish also has book club kits, equipped with comprehension questions and discussion points, to help readers explore stories mindfully. 

10. BookBub

While it’s very similar to Goodreads, BookBub focuses more on connecting readers to books that might suit them specifically — which is partly why you’ll see plenty of bargains and deals promoted on the site.

Because of this promotional value, BookBub has quite a strong author community. Diana Gabaldon and Gillian Flynn , for instance, are constantly recommending books on their accounts. So if you’d like to tag along with your favorite author, this is an excellent website to visit. The only drawback of BookBub is that they only have community reviews from users based in the US, and you have to sign up in order to read them. 

With these ten sites, you’ll be sure to find your little community of fellow book lovers regardless of what your interests are. Here’s to exciting TBR lists and nourished minds!

If you want to try your hand at reviewing, we’ve got a little guide to help you out ! On the other hand, if you want to plough away at your books, why not consider the Kindle Cloud Reader ?

Continue reading

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Struggling with fake reviews on e-com websites? Govt planning regulations

In a meeting held on may 15, the consumer affairs department noted that the presence of fake reviews on e-commerce platforms jeopardises the trustworthiness and credibility of shopping platforms.

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The Best Web Hosting Services

We’ve talked about, researched, used, and reviewed hosting platforms here at Crazy Egg for years. Consider this set of web hosting provider reviews the culmination of all that we’ve learned through our first-hand experience. After rigorous testing, we selected Hostinger as the best hosting service for most people because it’s so easy to set up and offers some of the lowest prices on the market. 

The Best Web Hosting Services for Most

Best for Storage

Get a cheap hosting provider that provides you a ton of room for storage. Their promo and renewal rates are both near the lowest in all of web hosting. Plus, Hostinger's easy guided setup gets your website live in just minutes.

Hostinger is one of the most affordable options on our list and one of the easiest hosts to get started with. Plans start at just $2.99 per month, which you can lock in for 48 months—meaning it costs less than $150 to not have to worry about paying a hosting bill for four years . But don’t let its cheap price tag fool you—Hostinger sure doesn’t feel like cheap hosting.

Its entry-level plan includes 100 GB of storage, a free domain, and a free SSL certificate for the first year. Plus, friendly 24/7 live chat support is there to give you personalized help along the way. You get everything you need to start a new website for less than the price of a cup of coffee each month. All Hostinger plans are backed by a 30-day money-back guarantee, and if you sign up today, you’ll get an additional three months for free.

The 9 Best Web Hosting Options to Consider:

• Hostinger – Best web hosting if you need a lot of storage
• Bluehost – Best for new WordPress users
• HostGator – Best for scaling your small business
• Web.com – Best website builder for simple business websites
• DreamHost – Best for simple, straightforward hosting
• SiteGround – Best for keeping uptime above 99.99%
• InMotion Hosting – Best price for hosting two websites
• Nexcess – Best for experienced WordPress users
• A2 Hosting – Most dependable web hosting for global traffic

When It Makes Sense to Invest In Web Hosting Services

Every website needs web hosting to exist on the internet. If you’re planning on spinning up a new site, you need to invest in web hosting as soon as you’re ready to launch it.

If you’re just practicing web design or trying out different website builders at this stage, you don’t need a web hosting service quite yet. But finding the right web hosting provider needs to be one of the first things on your to-do list when you’re actually ready to create a website . 

Organizations and individuals that want to expand their online presence beyond social media need a website and, thus, web hosting. More than anything, you’ll likely want a host that makes it as easy as possible for you to get started and set up from scratch.

With new websites, you shouldn’t worry too much about anything except:

• How easy it is to set up and get started on a web hosting service
• How accessible and helpful a hosting provider’s customer support is

Some of you might already have a website that’s live on the web. But if you’re using a free web hosting service or ineffective provider, it could be time for you to upgrade your service. In this scenario, you’ll need a hosting provider that can accommodate site migrations and presents an improvement in terms of server resources like storage space and memory.

If you’re looking for a web host but haven’t made a final decision, this post offers factual, experience-based data and insight you can use to help. Read on to learn what we found when we tested these web hosting brands and use our findings to help you make the right choice.

#1 – Hostinger — The Best If You Need a Lot of Storage

Do you want hosting that’s affordable, easy to use, and won’t break the bank? If so, Hostinger is the best choice. 

The low rates help to keep your budget on the straight and narrow. But you get everything you need to launch your website—fast. This includes up to 10x more storage than other hosts that with plans that cost more than Hostinger.

Signing up for web hosting can sometimes be filled with difficult steps to navigate. You’ll often get bombarded with all types of extra features and upsells you’re not sure you need. 

But Hostinger is different. The signup process is straightforward. Once you’ve selected your plan and made your payment, it’s smooth sailing. 

There’s no guessing where to go, what button to click, or what you have to do next. There’s zero confusion. Finishing up at checkout whisks you straight away to the setup wizard, which will guide you one step at a time through the process.

You’re asked about what type of site you’re creating, the name of your website, and whether or not you want to use an existing domain or register a new one. 

Confirm if you want to start a new website from scratch or if you want to migrate an existing website. Then, you’ll pick the content management system (CMS) you’ll use. If you go with WordPress, it’s at this stage that you’ll pick your site theme.

After that, you’ll receive name server info—if you’re using an existing domain name—and easy-to-read instructions to point your domain towards your new site if you’re starting from scratch. 

Then you’re done. 

The entire process takes a few minutes. 

By the time you’re done answering all of the questions and following the steps, you have a content management system in place, a theme installed, and your domain set up with basic site settings configured. 

In our experience, this was one of the easiest setup processes for any web host.

Don’t want to use WordPress? No worries. Hostinger acquired the website building platform Zyro a little while back and has integrated Zyro’s capabilities into its own site builder. It’s built precisely to make it easy for inexperienced users to create websites with minimal hassle or fuss.

It gives you straightforward drag-and-drop functionality, so you can get a new site up and running right away. It also makes it easy to start an online store, even if you have no experience with website creation at all.

Recently, Hostinger added AI capabilities into its website builder, making an already robust platform even more powerful.

Now you can use Hostinger to build your website in minutes by answering just three simple questions. The AI tool will automatically generate personalized images, content, and a fully customizable design for you.

But what about everything else that comes after you get your new Hostinger service set up?

They showed decent reliability and good speed during our testing. While we were a bit concerned by the number of connection timeouts (58, ranging from a few seconds to 30 minutes) we experienced in a month of testing, Hostinger delivered site load times that stayed pretty consistently under one second.

Those connection timeouts happen when a website is trying to use more resources than are available from the server, resulting in your browser not loading the site at all. This is a common problem with shared web hosting and few providers deliver perfect uptime on this tier of hosting. But this many separate incidents could spell trouble if any happen during times of peak traffic for your site.

Hostinger offers some key features that help keep load times low. Their seven global data centers spread across the United Kingdom, the United States, Brazil, Netherlands, Singapore, Indonesia, and Lithuania help reduce load times by closing the physical distance between site visitors and the server hosting your site.

Meanwhile, the LiteSpeed Caching plugin for WordPress delivers customizable, server-level caching, image optimization, lazy image loading, and database optimization to further speed up your site. And, it comes pre-installed, so your site is optimized from day one. 

Now, how about their customer support when things go awry?

When we put Hostinger’s support reps through their paces, we found that they could be a bit slow to respond but were thorough and friendly in their eventual responses.

We asked during one chat about the security features Hostinger offers and what we could do to make our site more secure.

It took 16 minutes to get help, but the rep sent us detailed instructions on how to enable Patchstack for security, then sent a screenshot of where to find everything in our dashboard. 

The chat itself was quick—after waiting over a quarter-hour for a response—and the support rep was very friendly. 

We loved that there was a resource provided that let us take immediate action without having to pay for anything new. And they didn’t try to upsell us.

Speaking of that, let’s get into what Hostinger will actually cost you. If you’re on a tight budget, this is the cheapest way to get everything you need. 

Here’s a closer look at Hostinger’s plans, pricing, and storage:

• Premium Shared – Starts at $2.99 per month with 100 GB SSD storage
• Business Shared – Starts at $3.99 per month with 200 GB SSD storage
• Cloud Startup – Starts at $9.99 per month with 200 GB NVMe Storage

These are introductory rates that require at least a one-year commitment. Depending on the plan you select, you may need to lock in a 48-month contract to get the lowest rate.

Right now, Hostinger is offering three months free when you lock in a long-term deal.

You also receive a free domain name for the first year, although you have some limitations on the domain name you can use. This can save you another $10 or so versus paying for a domain from a separate registrar. An email address tied to that domain also comes free with your subscription . You’ll just have to pay $5 if you want domain privacy.

If you want an incredibly affordable hosting provider with loads of storage capacity for your sites that also delivers an easy onboarding experience and plenty of tools for site speed, go with Hostinger . And, you can learn even more about this service through our detailed Hostinger review .

#2 – Bluehost — Best For New WordPress Users

Best For New WordPress Users

Bluehost offers high-quality web hosting that includes a free domain name and free website builder. It's affordable, user-friendly, extremely customizable, and dead simple to use. Plans start at just $2.95, and you can rest easy knowing your purchase is backed by a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Bluehost makes it easy for anyone to secure WordPress hosting and create a website under one roof. It’s powerful, affordable, and fast—and there’s no prior experience needed. 

There’s a good reason why Bluehost is just one of three hosting providers that’s officially recommended by WordPress. They provide exceptional customer support and a wide range of hosting packages that should be more than enough to handle the needs of most websites.

Every new hosting package comes with all of the basics you need to get started, including a free SSL certificate and free CDN.

Bluehost will even give you a free domain name for your first year. Bundling a domain with hosting is perfect for new websites seeking simplicity, as you won’t be forced to use multiple providers for things you could otherwise get in one place.

While Bluehost is definitely great for WordPress beginners, it’s also built to scale. You can simply upgrade to a higher-tiered shared hosting plan as your site gets more traffic or take it a step further with a VPS plan or dedicated server.

Here’s a closer look at the plan options and rates for shared hosting, which is where most of you will be starting:

• Basic – Starts at $2.95 per month
• Choice Plus – Starts at $5.45 per month
• Online Store – Starts at $9.95 per month
• Pro – Starts at $13.95 per month

All plans are backed by Bluehost’s 30-day money-back guarantee.

Strangely, Bluehost’s lowest available monthly rates don’t actually give you the best deal over time.

For example, the Basic plan starts at $2.95 with a one-year commitment. But then renews at $10.99 per month. But if you lock in a three-year plan at $4.95 per month, you’ll actually save just over $120 over 36 months.

It’s a bit confusing. But the easiest way to get the best deal is by committing to a longer contract from the beginning—even if it’s not the lowest monthly rate advertised.

Simply select your plan, create an account, and Bluehost takes you straight to a questionnaire covering your comfort with site building, your goals, and other considerations. Just how much help you’d like with site creation based on three options—ranging from fully DIY to completely hands-off.

If you select No help needed , Bluehost will stay clear and let you handle your site setup alone. Or, you can opt for a little help and get step-by-step instructions and tips as you handle the details and customization. 

With the Built for you option, you can set up a consultation and have Bluehost’s pros do everything for you for a fee.

During our testing, we picked the middle option for A little help , since that’s what most people will likely choose. This guided process starts with a question about what kind of site you’re creating. You can choose from a blog, an online store, a business-based website, or a portfolio.

If you’re not sure at this point or don’t want the extra help, you can even skip this specific step.

To create your site, you can choose from a basic WordPress install or Bluehost’s drag-and-drop builder. Some people will already know how to use WordPress to set up the site design that’s in their heads, but beginners may want the extra help and intuitiveness of the drag-and-drop Bluehost builder.

Bluehost’s site builder is easy to learn, and you can get a flawless design in less half the time it takes to learn the basics of WordPress. 

However, site speed and performance tend to suffer compared to a site fully designed on WordPress. Not drastically, and not meaningfully for simpler sites—but more intricate or media-heavy site designs will likely notice.

If you choose Bluehost’s builder, you’ll answer a few more questions and start designing your new site. If you go the straight WordPress route, Bluehost’s wizard asks about your industry and who you’re creating the website for, then leaves you to do the rest of the building.

After that, the setup wizard is complete. You’ll be automatically directed to your control panel.

To help you get started and familiar with WordPress, Bluehost offers a checklist of things to do to build out your website. This is super helpful and a great place for beginners to start. 

As for Bluehost’s customer support, being one of the biggest names in the industry, it has a lot to offer with its 24/7 hosting support. Bluehost’s reps offered adequate support when we needed it, and they were able to take care of the issues we had when they did arise. 

All in all, Bluehost is the web hosting option out there. It delivers the best built-in site builder among the hosting providers we’ve reviewed, and it makes the entire process of starting and building a website seamless.

If you want to go even deeper into this hosting provider’s virtues and flaws, check out our dedicated Bluehost review .

#3 – HostGator — Best Hosting for Scaling Your Small Business

Best for Scalability

With a killer combination of speed, uptime, affordability, and numerous flexible plans to choose from, HostGator brings a lot to the table. Its flexible hosting packages across all types of hosting make it easy to upgrade and scale once your business website takes off and demands better performance.

HostGator ‘s array of hosting plans—from standard shared and WordPress hosting to VPS plans , cloud, and dedicated options—lets you upgrade incrementally as the popularity of your company website or online store creates new demands on it.

It’s cloud hosting where HostGator really becomes appealing to growing small businesses.

Cloud-based servers are twice as fast and four times more scalable than servers used for shared hosting. With just one click, you can ramp up your resources at any time without worrying about downtime, reboots, or data migrations.

If your site traffic levels have risen to a new normal where shared hosting just won’t cut it, you can easily jump up to HostGator’s cloud hosting packages without your wallet taking a big hit.

In fact, cloud hosting from HostGator starts at just $4.95 per month (for a three-year commitment), which is cheaper than some other providers’ mid-tier shared plans.

Plus, if you start one of the shared hosting plans—which are also eminently affordable, starting at $3.75 per month—you can easily upgrade from your HostGator dashboard by clicking Manage Package .

Having easy, affordable access to the next step up from shared hosting can do wonders for your peace of mind. With HostGator, you know you have access to a better experience for site visitors once the popularity you’ve dreamed of becomes a reality.

But how did HostGator fare in our testing?

On the performance front, we only tested out their shared hosting, which delivered slightly above average uptime and load times. That bodes well for getting the boost in performance you’d expect if you graduate to cloud hosting. Twice-as-fast servers should mean you’ll see average site load times under one-third of a second on HostGator’s cloud plans.

Outside of that, “just above average” continues to describe our experience with HostGator’s signup, onboarding, and customer support.

The checkout process is pretty typical, though there are quite a few upsells to navigate before finalizing your purchase. Fortunately, none are pre-selected to try to sneak a higher bill by you.

• Premium SSL certificate for $39.99 per year
• SiteLock Essentials for $35.88 per year
• Google Workspace Account for $7.20 per month
• Automatic backups for $23.95 per year
• HostGator SEO tools for $35.40 per month

Google Workspace might be the only one you would like to have, but you can always sign up for it later or separately. It allows you to have business email set up through Gmail and access the other tools in the suite.

But the others are not required or essential. And, frankly, we’re disappointed that automated backups are only a paid add-on at a steep price ($24 per year is too much for something other providers often include for free), not to mention a paid add-on just for SEO tools.   

After completing checkout, we found the step-by-step setup wizard easy to follow and the dashboard also easy to navigate. You’re taken directly to a few questions about your skill level and the purpose of your site. 

HostGator learns how much you know and what you want to accomplish in order to try and tailor your onboarding experience. 

After that, you’ll pick the content management system (CMS) you want to use. WordPress is the preferred choice and it only takes a few moments to set up.

Next, you’ll see all of your login credentials and a video to help you get started with WordPress. It walks you through how to navigate the WordPress dashboard, install plugins, change and customize themes, and more. 

It’s well-made and helpful for folks just getting started or who need a refresher. 

Nobody else had this so easily available, so this was a definite standout in favor of HostGator.

In terms of support and customer service, HostGator’s reps were solid, if a bit pushy in terms of upselling.

We almost always connected immediately with a rep when we initiated a live support chat. However, while the reps always understood our questions and addressed them directly, their first instinct seems to be recommending paid upgrades and add-ons to solve common issues.

For example, in one interaction, we asked how the HostGator rep could help us improve site security. The rep identified themselves as a security expert, so we were confident it was going to go well. 

But they immediately recommended a paid security upgrade and copied and pasted a bunch of features into the chat. We asked if there was anything we could do for free and the rep passed us off to someone else.

This was not great service at all. We found it annoying and inefficient, especially since they introduced themselves as a security expert. Shouldn’t they know what we can do without paying extra? 

The second rep that entered the chat briefly explained how they secure things on their end and sent us a support article on what to do on our end. 

We liked that they explained their security measures, though they didn’t really tell us what we could do to keep our site secure. 

Overall, it felt kind of rushed and salesy.

Other support interactions were a bit less focused on upselling and more mindful of helping us DIY a solution, but the overall quality of support hovers between slightly above and slightly below average.

All that being said, there isn’t much to complain about with HostGator. And, the accessibility of graduating from shared hosting makes them a rock-solid choice for businesses and organizations who are mindful of scaling up their websites.

We love their cloud hosting options. But, since we tested them mostly on their shared plans, you can learn all about this tier of web hosting from HostGator in our dedicated review of their cloud hosting plans .

HostGator can be a great hosting provider for the long haul. Set your company site up for prolonged success by getting started on HostGator’s shared or cloud plans .

#4 – Web.com — Best Website Builder for Simple Business Websites

Best for Simple Business Websites

With its easy-to-use drag-and-drop builder, Web.com is perfect for getting a professional-looking website up in mere minutes. If ecommerce is your game, Web.com has the tools to help you build an online store you'll be proud of. It even has marketing tools built in to grow your reach.

Web.com puts a lot of effort into making website building easy, so you can focus on the things that truly matter in your business. It takes simplicity very seriously. But don’t let that ease-of-use fool you. Web.com doesn’t cut corners when it comes to website functionality, speed, and security. In fact, it does all of that as well as the big-named hosts on this list.

We all want that beautiful website, but let’s be honest, we want it to be easy and take less time. And constant website maintenance? No, thanks!

Web.com comes with over 150 pre-designed, responsive templates that you can use straight out of the box. But it doesn’t stop there. Web.com gives you one of the easiest drag-and-drop website builders to use that we’ve come across. Literally, it’s click, drag, drop. That’s it.

To top it all off, Web.com excels at providing you the guided onboarding that you need to create your website in no time at all, so you know that you are in good hands with the Web.com experts who are there any time you need.

Web.com keeps things simple and straightforward with its web hosting options as well.

Its in-house web hosting and WordPress hosting packages are nearly identical. Both start with a Basic option for $2.75 per month (with a three-year commitment), giving you access to one website, 10GB of storage, and up to 15,000 monthly visits.

As you continue to grow and scale, Web.com offers you its Plus and Premium plans, with the latter supporting 10 websites, 40GB of storage, and up to 200,000 monthly visits for just $5.95 per month across three years.

The major difference between its hosting options is that if you go with WordPress hosting, you won’t be able to use Web.com’s website builder.

Knowing that you have options as you scale provides peace of mind. Your simple business websites might surpass your wildest dreams, and Web.com will be ready for you.

For those who want to take things up a notch and really invest in a simple business website for the long term, Web.com offers plans to not only run a website but that also add in marketing features like email marketing and its pay-per-click advertising tool.

The Website plan gets you in the door for $4.95 per month with just the basics for a website. But when you are ready to start turning that hobby into something more, Web.com’s higher tiers add on all sorts of solid marketing and scheduling features.

If you want to build that ecommerce store that you’ve always been dreaming off, Web.com has affordable options for you to sell your products and services anywhere!

For its Online Store and Marketplaces plans, Web.com gives you the tools to have your store up and running with everything from store setup to order management to shipping and taxes at checkout. These plans equip you with all of the essentials to be a successful store owner: lead forms to grow your email list, secure checkout and payment options, and even built-in capabilities for discounts, site-wide sales, and coupons.

But how did Web.com fare in our experience?

Well, there was no doubt that it is great for beginners who want simple websites built with ease—especially simple business websites.

We never had an issue connecting with a rep to answer our questions via the live chat on the website. The answers weren’t always perfect, but for the most part we were able to get sufficient guidance.

You’ll really appreciate that Web.com has integrated AI that can help you write copy, whether you need it for your website, landing pages, or your next greatest email campaign.

There isn’t much not to like about Web.com when you’re just getting started with building a website or ecommerce store. It is a strong choice for businesses that want a quick and easy business website up without the hassle.

Check out more on Web.com with our more detailed review.

Get your small business website started today with Web.com and start reaching new customers.

#5 – DreamHost — Best for Simple, Straightforward Hosting

Best for Simple Hosting

Trusted by 1.5+ million users with 750,000+ WordPress installations, DreamHost offers one of the most stress-free hosting experiences. Automated backups of your site every day, one-click WordPress installation, automated updates--DreamHost includes these time-savers with every hosting plan. Hosting as low as $2.69 per month.

Over the years, DreamHost has performed well for millions of users. They are officially recommended by WordPress and offer fantastically affordable month rates on their hosting packages.

If you need solid hosting without any bells and whistles, this might just be the provider for you. You won’t have to worry about downtime at all, even for the low price you pay. During our month of testing a bare-bones website, we only encountered a single server-side error that lasted less than a minute.

This is outstanding since some other hosts are more expensive and don’t give you this type of uptime reliability.

As it stands today, they are the best host for launching a simple website and being confident that it will always be available to visitors.

DreamHost also offers resources protection that helps with keeping load times down on your site without you having to lift a finger. The DreamHost team monitors resources 24/7 to keep an eye on things to ensure your site performance doesn’t suffer from other websites on your shared server or external threats like bots or direct attacks.

These benefits make it easy to get a website live on DreamHost and be assured that your site will perform well when visitors arrive, letting you focus on marketing your business or generating new customers and revenue.

That being said, getting started on DreamHost isn’t as easy as it is with some of its peers. Once we got going, everything was great. But it took a minute to get there.

There are confusing upsells and preselected optional features to navigate during the checkout process. If you’re not careful, you’ll be paying for extras you might not need that can nearly double the price you’ll pay.

After you enter your account information, you’ll run into these add-ons:

• DreamShield Protection (preselected) for $3 per month
• DreamHost Email (preselected) for $19.99 per year
• Google Workspace (not preselected) for $6 per month after a 30-day free trial

This is the only provider that makes you pay for email if you want it. Very different from every other provider on the list, though not totally unusual in the rest of the hosting world. You have the choice between DreamHost’s email service, Google Workspace for email (and more), or neither.

Make sure to keep an eye out for these if you do sign up for DreamHost.

Another thing that can trip up beginners is the lack of instruction on how to proceed after utilizing DreamHost’s one-click WordPress installer. We knew we were supposed to log into our WordPress dashboard, but that may not be clear to a first-time user of web hosting. 

It took around eight minutes for the WordPress installation to complete. We got a welcome email after it was installed, but it wasn’t very helpful. In the email, there were a ton of links with too much info and not enough explanation for web hosting novices.

It was a bit confusing since it included FTP (file transfer protocol) login information, with no explanation of what this is or why it’s separate from the account we just created. 

In a second email, it gave us WordPress login info. But again, it was confusing and had no explanation of why this is different from the two other logins we already created. Also, there was no information on how to actually connect the domain we wanted to use.

We found it very easy to get started on the WordPress side of things, once you actually figure out how to get there. 

Once you do log into WordPress, there’s a nice configuration wizard that walks you through choosing a theme, adding the pages you need, and adding social media and contact info.

We loved that you can set up the kind of pages you want from the start, choosing from three options: 

• Base: includes Home, About, and Contact pages
• Five Page: includes Base pages, plus two more preconfigured pages based on the theme you pick
• Kitchen Sink: everything from Five Page, plus four more preconfigured pages 

We can see this being very helpful for anyone who has never built a site before. 

You can also toggle blog functionality on or off. So, if you want a blog installed it’s as easy as flipping a switch.

Fortunately, DreamHost’s customer support is sterling and can help you with any hiccups or roadblocks along the way.

Depending on the topic of your question, you can either start a live chat or submit a ticket. When submitting a ticket, you can let them know how much experience you have and the level of detail you need. Which is unique to DreamHost customer support.

When we asked to contact a rep, we were connected immediately and asked them how we could improve speed on our site. The DreamHost representative did a speed test on our website so they could offer personalized advice on how to make it faster, which was nice. 

Since there’s no content on our site, there wasn’t much advice to offer but we still appreciated that they tried. 

After that, the rep sent us a support article with more steps and information to continue to optimize our site further. 

When it comes to pricing, DreamHost offers some of the best affordability you can find. Most of what we’ve described in this review even comes with Dreamhost’s cheapest plan.

Like with most hosting providers, you get a better deal when you sign up for anything between a one-year and a three-year commitment.

• Shared Starter – Starts at $2.59 per month
• Shared Unlimited – Starts at $3.95 per month
• Cloud Hosting – Starts at $4.50 per month
• VPS Hosting – Starts at $10 per month
• Managed WordPress Hosting – Starts at $16.95 per month

Perhaps the best aspect of DreamHost’s pricing is its affordability outside of this introductory rate. All web hosts will give you a better deal when you lock in your usage of their services for a longer time. But DreamHost doesn’t gouge you nearly as much as other providers in two key ways: month-to-month billing and renewal rates.

Most others will charge you upwards of $10 per month if you opt for monthly billing over an annual commitment or longer. Not DreamHost. You can try out or use their hosting without risk of commitment for just $4.95 per month.

And, no matter which billing cadence you choose, you’re going to come out way ahead on renewal pricing. Again, most providers will ratchet this up a good deal from your introductory rate. But DreamHost keeps renewals low, with monthly billing renewing at $7.99 per month after the three-month promotional period and one-year and three-year terms renewing at $6.99 and $5.99 per month, respectively.

If you are unsure how long you need your website to be running or if you simply are hesitant to pay for a year or more up front, you’ll appreciate DreamHost’s affordable monthly payment plans.

When you look at the value for the price, it’s hard to see where they could improve.

Even though you pay such a small price for the hosting plan, you get an above-average customer support experience coupled with exceptional uptime reliability. DreamHost stands out as a great hosting option .

Want more information on what we’ve discovered about this hosting provider in our research? Check out our full DreamHost review .

#6 – SiteGround — Best Hosting for Keeping Uptime Above 99.99%

Best Uptime Reliability

With SiteGround, you never have to worry about your site being inaccessible to visitors. In 30 days, our site experienced a mere 2 seconds of downtime, making it the most reliable shared hosting option on our list. Get fantastic uptime reliability, an easy onboarding experience, and solid customer support.

If you want a website that’s available for your visitors 24/7/365, SiteGround has your back. 

When we ran our month-long tests for all the hosting providers we cover in this post, they destroyed the competition. None of the other shared hosting providers on this list were even close to the performance SiteGround delivered.

In terms of uptime, it’s unfailing. We only experienced two total seconds of downtime over 30 days.

Blink your eyes twice—that’s how long our website was unavailable and no longer. 

Versus the average of all providers on our list of 23 minutes and 55 seconds of downtime, SiteGround performed significantly better than average.

If your web hosting is down, it means your website doesn’t exist for those trying to find it. And that’s a problem for your site revenue, user experience, and online reputation.

SiteGround makes sure your site’s always up, so people can always find your home on the web.

On top of that, we found SiteGround to be one the faster shared web hosts on the market. Outside of a couple surges during our month of testing, load times stayed comfortably around half a second.

And it gets even better. SiteGround is incredibly kind to web hosting novices. Their user interface makes it a breeze to manage your websites with its organized layout and smooth design. 

From start to finish, we had an incredible onboarding experience. After checking out, we received a welcome email with instructions on what to do next. 

A simple click of a link in the email brings you to the customer area, where you can start a new website on WordPress, WooCommerce, or Weebly or migrate an existing one. 

Once your site application of choice finishes installing, you’re taken directly to a screen that helps you connect your domain to your new site or head straight to SiteGround’s Site Tools for management.

We love how clear they make setting up your domain name after getting the groundwork of your site laid. It’s right in your face. No way to miss it. 

You also get clear, step-by-step instructions in the dashboard for helping you point your domain, transfer a domain, or utilize a temporary URL. 

Overall, the entire process is easy to navigate through, even if you’ve never done it before.

If you get stuck or run into issues, SiteGround’s customer support will ease your troubled mind.

When we asked their live chat support a question to test their response times and service, we were connected immediately to someone.

We asked about how to improve the security on our site and the SiteGround rep told us to turn on automatic core WordPress updates and automatic plugin updates. These are the most common ways sites get hacked. Having the latest updates improves security and removes vulnerabilities. 

The rep told us this right away, they knew exactly what we were asking for.

We loved that there were no upsells to paid security products. The whole interaction only took four minutes and we left the conversation knowing exactly what to do.

SiteGround’s support was great and none of the reps tried to sell us anything during our interactions. They only cared about solving our problems.

The only downside here, in general, is the price.

The entry-level plan starts at $2.99 per month. However, that’s only for a one-year commitment—and jumps to $17.99 per month upon renewal.

Strangely, a two-year commitment is actually more expensive. A lot more, in fact, at the time of this writing ($7.49 per month). And monthly billing is an exorbitant $24.99 per month.

And that’s just for their entry-level shared hosting. More robust plans cost even more across the board.

Overall, it’s going to cost you a good bit more to go with SiteGround. But, if you want peace of mind in the form of unfailing uptime and customer support, that extra cost might just be worth it.

If you want reliability and can afford something higher than rock-bottom pricing, SiteGround is an excellent choice for hosting your site .

For more information on what this provider offers, read through our full SiteGround review .

#7 – InMotion Hosting — Best Price for Hosting Two Websites

InMotion Hosting

Best for hosting multiple sites.

The only provider where you can host two websites on the same entry-level shared hosting plan, InMotion delivers solid uptime and great loading speeds no matter if you choose to host one site or two on it. And good customer service is available for any hiccups that may arise along the way.

InMotion Hosting is the only web host on this list that lets you host two websites on its entry-level shared hosting plan. To sweeten the deal even more, it’s cheaper than some other providers’ plans that only give you one website.

For just $3.49 per month on a one-year contract, you can host two sites for the price of one. Plus, you can get an even sweeter price point if you commit to two or three years at checkout.

You won’t have to manage two hosting plans on different platforms or deal with the headaches of separate billing and renewal deadlines. Just one source of truth for hosting two websites on a quality provider’s shared servers.

How quality? InMotion’s shared hosting was the fastest of the providers we tested with an average load time of just over one-third of a second. And our month of testing revealed that InMotion delivers 99.99% uptime, too.

InMotion Hosting is rather generous with their shared hosting plans. Even on the cheapest option, you get UltraStack Optimized Performance, a proprietary operating system stack from InMotion that makes your site as fast as possible from the start. You don’t have to touch anything to unlock the best possible performance.

You also get some control over data centers, allowing you to optimize content delivery based on where most of your site visitors live.

The trade-off? InMotion tends to be a bit more expensive than its peers on average and sports an interface and setup process that isn’t terribly kind to the inexperienced.

But budget-conscious users won’t sweat InMotion Hosting’s prices if their needs are simple enough. And, like we said, this is the best deal you can find for getting shared hosting for two websites in one plan. Host two websites, plus get 100 GB of storage, free marketing tools, and more for as little as $2.49 per month with a three-year contract.

That’s a compelling package, made even more appealing by solid live chat and ticketed support.

When we tested InMotion’s support reps out on three separate occasions, each of our interactions revealed a support staff that’s helpful, transparent, and polite, though it can take some time to connect with someone.

In one interaction, we asked about improving the security of our test site. The rep gave us lots of great information about on-site security, including SSLs and server-side protections they have in place.

After that, the rep mentioned a paid security tool called Sucuri, but they were honest to us by mentioning that it costs extra. And the representative even said we probably didn’t need it at the moment, considering our site was brand-new.

We appreciate that the rep took the time to explain things to us rather than immediately sending us to a support article. 

And we really liked that they didn’t mention a paid upgrade until the very end, shooting straight about it not being free and likely being unnecessary for our site at this point.

Our only real issue with InMotion Hosting is that the onboarding process and customer dashboard is hard to navigate. It’s not easy to understand what comes next or even see beyond the bunched-up interface. 

When you finish the signup process there’s no instruction on how to proceed, making it stressful for anyone not familiar with setting up web hosting.

In our opinion, the checkout process was clunky. It felt unnecessarily long compared to other checkout processes. Plus, there were a ton of fields to fill out and a few pre-selected upsells to uncheck.

And, there’s very little to help guide you after checkout. Once our account was created, we received three different emails with what to do next and our account information, but the most helpful resource was a single attachment outlining steps to get a new site set up.

We definitely wish there was more of a guided process or setup wizard like most of the other hosts have. At this point, we didn’t even have WordPress installed and we feel that first-time users might not know how to accomplish that without more guidance.

One thing InMotion Hosting offers to help in this regard is a free 30-minute onboarding call, something no other web host on this list offers. That can help you along the way if you’re confused. We didn’t test this out, so we cannot attest to its quality or helpfulness. We can only say that it’s a feature you can take advantage of. 

But, if our experiences with their customer support are any indication, this could be a very helpful resource for anyone who isn’t experienced with web hosting setup and administration.

At the shared level, InMotion has four different plans to choose from:

• Core – $2.49 per month
• Launch – $4.99 per month
• Power – $4.99 per month
• Pro – $12.99 per month

The rates above reflect a three-year contract, paid in full. And yes, the Launch and Power plans have the same introductory pricing offer. But the Launch plan renews at $11.99 per month, and the Power plan renews at $15.99 per month.

This puts the Launch plan in no-man’s land. If the Core package isn’t enough for you, then you can jump straight into Power.

All in all, InMotion Hosting provides a well-rounded blend of performance, support, and unique benefits—primarily the ability to host two sites on their entry-level shared plan.

If you want to dig even deeper into this provider, read our full review of InMotion Hosting to get all the ins, outs, and nitty-gritty details.

Or, if you know that the value of hosting two websites for the price of one is worth it alone, get signed up and started on InMotion Hosting today .

#8 – Nexcess — Best Web Hosting for Experienced WordPress Users

Best for WordPress Pros

If you're an experienced WordPress user and want a step up from the wide array of basic shared hosting options, go with Nexcess. Its hosting provides a fantastic combo of speed, security, and uptime with a great deal of user control for maximizing your resources without all the bloated features you don't need.

Nexcess is a step up for the other web hosts on this list. It’s a top-tier web host for WordPress users. 

They don’t offer shared hosting plans and they specialize in fully managed traditional and ecommerce hosting. Managed hosting takes a lot of the work of maintenance and optimization off of your plate.

This is the top option for users who know what they’re doing in terms of site and hosting administration and want a bit more control over their servers and web hosting experience. So, it’s not as beginner-friendly as the others. 

Because of that, its setup process is a good bit more difficult than that of most other providers’. There’s very little direction and guidance, but the trade-off with that is more control.

One example of that extra degree of control is your ability to choose your server location at checkout. Nexcess has ten data centers across locations like:

• United Kingdom

When you complete checkout, you’re sent an email containing a link to the Nexcess Client Portal to finish setting up your account.

After clicking on the email link, you’re taken back to the signup page. After you click Purchase , you are immediately redirected to your portal with a popup message that says it’ll take a few minutes to set up your new plan. 

There’s a short tutorial walking you through important features of the portal and how to navigate it, which you can access by clicking Learn More in the pop-up.

Once everything is ready to go, you can start navigating the Nexcess dashboard and control panel. It definitely feels like a portal that’s more suited for advanced users who have specific preferences. 

We found a detailed analytics section that allows you to look at total bandwidth and disk space used, in addition to other key metrics. Data like this is something you can wield to inform improvements to your site.

Nexcess is all about performance, and our research validates that. They delivered truly 100% uptime (no incidents and zero seconds of total downtime) over our 30 days of testing. Site load times stayed reliably around one-half of a second. 

On top of that, auto-scaling technology from Nexcess lets your site go beyond your PHP limits for a short amount of time in cases of intense traffic surges. That ensures your site doesn’t crash when it gets a sudden, massive influx of visitors. Even on your busiest days, every user will experience fast load times and great performance no matter what.

You also get to tap into Nexcess’ preconfigured content delivery network (CDN) and image Compression and lazy loading to keep your website a lean and mean, well-performing machine.  

And, befitting a service catering to more experienced users, Nexcess’ support team demonstrates expertise when you need some help. They gave us no-nonsense answers, fast.

Perhaps predictably, this comes at a steeper price. Nexcess isn’t your average budget shared web hosting provider. They cater to the more experienced and their plans’ price points reflect that.

The lowest-cost ways to get started are either of their entry-level plans tailored for WordPress or WooCommerce. Both start at $17.50 per month for a 12-month term.

But there is something unique about Nexcess. On renewal, there’s no increase in price. They’re the only provider on the list to have this price lock guarantee. 

If you’re currently using another hosting provider and you’re thinking of switching, Nexcess is an appealing option to consider. In addition to offering fast and free site migrations (like most all providers on our list), Nexcess will pay up to $200 to get you out of your existing contract.

This is a potent package for users who are comfortable with a hosting provider that doesn’t cater to novices. If you’re one of those people, stop playing around in the shallow waters of web hosting and tap into the sterling performance that Nexcess provides .

#9 – A2 Hosting — Most Dependable Web Hosting for Global Traffic

Best for Global Dependability

If you are catering your website to mostly European and Asian audiences or just want reliability for visitors from all over the globe, use A2 Hosting's server selection to make sure everyone gets a pleasant site experience. Enjoy multiple data centers, excellent customer support, and decent performance.

A2 Hosting is known for delivering fast load times for the sites it hosts. They display this proudly on their homepage.

But what you may not already know is how well their data centers perform for site visitors located in Europe and Asia. They are exceptional at catering to searchers, browsers, and shoppers in these parts of the world.

If you do business globally with customers or fans in these areas, you need a web host you can trust that’s built to perform as well for them as your visitors located in the United States.

It starts with the ability to tap into A2’s servers in Amsterdam and Singapore, reducing load times for visitors in the Eastern Hemisphere by reducing the physical distance between them and the servers hosting your site.

A2 Hosting also offers pre-configured installations of several different CMS systems, WordPress included. All of your optimization settings are set up for you out of the box, including image, file, and code compression to keep your website lean and running fast. You also get basic cache control, so your site doesn’t need to be fetched every time a user needs to access it. 

The unique plan structure of A2’s shared hosting offerings gives you multiple paths to great-performing servers without breaking the bank.

The lowest-priced shared plan, Startup, can cost as little as $2.99 per month. That gives you everything we’ve mentioned so far.

But, you can supercharge your shared hosting by picking one of A2’s two Turbo plans. The more affordable of the two starts at $6.99 per month and gives you access to specialized servers that can perform up to 20 times faster and handle nine times more traffic than traditional shared servers.

The Turbo plans also unlock traffic surge protection (which adds more resources to your plan temporarily when a sudden uptick in traffic threatens to crash your site), A2’s proprietary site accelerator technology, and additional advanced, performance-minded features.

All in all, it’s a really good deal, especially for site owners concerned about accommodating traffic coming from all over the globe.

The only downside here is a relatively difficult onboarding process.

Checking out is challenging, as the process is riddled with upsells and a condensed interface that overwhelms users by cramming a lot of information into one screen.  

As you can see below, we tested out simply purchasing one month of basic shared hosting and were greeted at the end of checkout by a price tag that was six times greater than what we expected.

If you’ve never done this before, you won’t know what some of these items refer to or why the price is so much different than you thought it would be.

You might notice the culprit above if you look closely: one year of an SSL certificate (which is usually included for free on other providers) for a whopping $49.99.

That’s because it’s a pre-checked upsell in the checkout process. You may see “Rapid SSL” and assume you need it, but the free SSL that comes with the plan already is more than enough.

It feels very misleading. It should be clear as day that it’s advanced and not required. But it’s not.

The dashboard itself isn’t any better. It’s a bit cluttered and, when you first log into your new A2 account after purchase, there’s absolutely no guidance on what to do next.

We also received a welcome email after finalizing our purchase, but it was filled with jargon. There was no beginner-friendly explanation on how our control panel, FTP, and email actually work, or why each of them has separate accounts. 

This leaves you to manage multiple passwords, which can easily be forgotten or lost in the shuffle of all the information they blast you with. 

A2 Hosting’s onboarding could definitely be a more user-friendly experience with help, guidance, and step-by-step instructions on how to move forward. 

While that isn’t too kind to web hosting novices, A2 makes up for it in terms of support. They’re one of the few providers we’ve seen that offers the full array of options—live chat, email, ticket, and phone support—on any hosting plan. Often, you have to spring for a more expensive tier of hosting or the highest-priced shared plan to access phone support.

You also get free site migrations on any A2 plan, as well, making it easy to switch to them if your current hosting provider isn’t getting the job done for your international site visitors.

In the end, A2 Hosting is a smart choice if your website has a global audience, or at least global aspirations. If you want to get more into the details of A2’s Turbo offerings and other virtues and flaws of their service, dive into our detailed A2 Hosting review .

Or, waste no more time catering to your international visitors. Get A2 Hosting and enjoy the blend of performance and control at an easy-to-stomach price point.

How We Chose the Best Web Hosting Services

Our team compiled over 100 pages of research and data, gathered over months, to give us crystal-clear proof on which hosting providers deliver on their promises. 

For every host that we evaluated, we went through the same testing procedure:

• Create a brand-new account
• Go through the entire signup and onboarding process
• Install WordPress and build a bare-bones website on it
• Monitor uptime and site speed for a full month using Freshping
• Submit three customer support tickets to test the helpfulness and knowledge of reps

These findings informed our reviews of each provider, where we weighed their qualities in five key areas:

• Ease of getting set up
• Site performance (load times and uptime)
• Quality of customer support
• Scalability

Let’s dive a bit into the details of those four criteria.

So Easy, You Can Deploy a Site In One Day

When we started our definitive research on web hosts, we wanted to make sure getting started with a provider was easier than popping the top on a ketchup bottle. 

So, we looked at every aspect of our onboarding experience, testing and documenting how easy or hard things were during signup, setup, and site building.

We also paid extra attention to any pesky upsells—hidden or obvious—lurking within the checkout process.

For each hosting provider, we judged them on: 

• Any upsells or trickery during checkout
• The user-friendliness of the hosting dashboard’s interface and navigation
• The amount of guidance given to users during initial setup
• Whether they provided clear instructions on how to connect a domain name

Some providers send you a ton of emails that have links and instructions that are hard to understand, lowering our opinion of them in terms of ease of use. Worse, others don’t send you instructions via email at all.

We loved that many of providers we reviewed make the onboarding process automatic, and don’t require you to be an expert. On the other hand, we feel that some were trying to win an award for being the most frustrating. 

In each review above, you’ll find our thoughts on how easy it is to get started with a provider. If tech-savviness isn’t your strength, pay attention to these sections of our reviews so you can find a provider that helps you rather than leaves you frustrated.

Never Lose Visitors Due to Downtime or Slow Loading Again

Got a slow or unavailable website? Kiss your visitors and search rankings goodbye. 

While these performance metrics are subject to a wide array of factors—ranging from the quality of a host’s servers to how much content is on your site and a whole lot more—we wanted to get some benchmarks to set your expectations appropriately.

So, our team put each host through its paces for 30 days by monitoring our sites’ performance via Freshping. After the testing period ended, we looked at the results and used them to call out both the high-performing hosts and the disappointments of the bunch.

We also took the time to look into other included features unique to each provider that can help your site stay speedy and available to anyone, anywhere. When a provider offered helpful tools like automated image compression or caching tools, we called them out in the review.

Keep in mind, these are the results we got on very basic, content-sparse websites. Your mileage may vary if your own site is more media-heavy or elaborate in any other way.

But, in terms of an apples-to-apples comparison, we’re confident that these tests are indicative of how the individual performance of these hosts stack up against one another.

The True Cost of Hosting Your Website

Do you like spending hard-earned money on something you don’t know is going to work? 

Neither do we.

Most shared hosting plans from the leading providers are clustered around the same price points. You’ll usually find an entry-level plan between $2 and $4 per month, with more advanced plans ticking up by a dollar or so per month for each progressive tier.

That being said, what isn’t always obvious is the way to get the best deal from each web host.

Some reward you for committing to a longer contract term upfront, giving you a lower average monthly rate if you purchase two years or more at initial checkout.

Others reserve their best pricing for one-year contract terms, raising the monthly rate for anything longer or shorter than that.

Also, renewal prices that kick in after your initial term expires can vary wildly from one provider to another. Some keep you near your initial rate, while others jack up the monthly price tag north of $10, even on the most basic shared hosting plans.

We cut through the confusion in our reviews above, drilling down to the brass tacks about what the best deal is and what a quality hosting plan will really cost you.

Connect with a Human Support Rep In Minutes

Prompt, helpful, and friendly customer support is one of the most important benefits you can get from any web host. And it’s all the more important for those of you securing hosting for a website for the first time, or anyone who doesn’t have a ton of experience with the setup and administration of web hosting.

We tested out each provider’s support team on three separate occasions to get an objective view of whether they tend to be helpful or not.

In the end, we assessed their support quality on a few key performance indicators:

• Offered help without pushing unnecessary paid upgrades
• How quickly we were connected with a rep after initiating live chat
• The availability of phone support on entry-level plans
• Whether reps went above and beyond to help us, instead of simply sending us a link to an article or resource
• The overall friendliness, listening skills, and knowledge of the reps we interacted with

When customer support was exceptionally good or underwhelming, we pointed it out in the reviews above. Some providers delivered support that left us feeling more frustrated than before, while others showed real empathy and expertise when chatting with us.

If you are confident that you can handle anything your website or host can throw at you, make sure to pay special attention to our assessment of each providers’ quality of customer support.

Beyond basic support, it’s worth noting that you can also get plans that come with more than just fast replies to new tickets. For example, if you go with a managed WordPress hosting plan , you’ll benefit from dedicated WordPress experts managing your servers, handling patches, and maintaining all updates on your behalf. So take this into consideration if you’re planning to run your site on WordPress and you’re looking for support that goes the extra mile.

Planning for the Future

The web hosting plan you select today won’t necessarily be the same plan you’re on in five or ten years. But that doesn’t mean you need to switch web hosts in the future.

Web hosting comes in all different shapes and sizes—and when you’re first getting started, it makes sense to start with a shared plan. This is simple, affordable, and comes with plenty of resources for new websites.

But shared hosting doesn’t give you the best possible performance. As the name implies, you’re sharing server resources with other websites on the same shared server. So if traffic for one site spikes, it could ultimately slow down the performance of your own website.

The plan you select right now will only get you so far. But once you start getting 10,000 or 25,000 visitors per month, you’ll likely need to upgrade your plan to accommodate the influx in traffic.

This is a good problem to have. But you shouldn’t have to switch web hosting providers to accommodate more visitors.

That’s why all of the providers on our list are built to scale.

So whether you want to upgrade your tier within the shared level or switch to a completely different type of web hosting, you should be planning for the future during the initial signup process.

Upgrading to cloud hosting or a virtual private server is the next logical step from the shared level. This should be more than enough to support you through 50,000 or even upwards of 100,000 visits per month.

Securing rock-solid web hosting is imperative for your first website or your 50th. You want to get this decision right the first time, every time.

Hostinger is our top recommendation for most people. It’s affordable, easy for beginners, and offers quality hosting services that can scale with you as your site grows. However, your needs may dictate that one of the others we reviewed in this past fits your needs and use case better.

We can say with full confidence that you’ll get quality service from any of the web hosting services we reviewed above. But make sure to dig into the reviews themselves to gain full confidence about which one is the ideal choice for you.

Make your website better. Instantly.

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The Best Chimney Cleaning Services in America

By Nicole Fallon-Peek , Jeff Keleher

Updated on Nov 14, 2023 9:55 AM EST

13 minute read

Best Overall

Midtown Chimney Sweeps

Best emergency service.

United Home Services

Best for repairs.

Flue Tech Inc.

We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. Learn More ›

Chimney cleaning is an essential part of owning a fireplace and using a chimney, as failure to properly care for it can lead to fire hazards and other dangers. While do-it-yourself chimney cleaning is always an option, it can be risky for homeowners to take matters into their own hands.

Hiring a professional chimney cleaning service can save homeowners the hassle of doing it themselves, and it won’t break the bank. However, it’s crucial to find a local chimney sweep with the right experience and credentials. Many chimney cleaning companies also offer free inspections and have certifications that prove their credibility. Before searching for “chimney cleaning near me,” homeowners can consider our four top picks for the best chimney cleaning services.

• BEST OVERALL:  Midtown Chimney Sweeps
• BEST EMERGENCY SERVICE:  United Home Services
• BEST FOR REPAIRS:  Flue Tech Inc. 
• BEST AGGREGATOR:  HomeAdvisor

What to Consider When Choosing One of the Best Chimney Cleaning Services

Hiring the right chimney cleaning service will guarantee a chimney is safe from fire hazards and creosote buildup. When deciding which chimney cleaning service is best for their chimney, homeowners will want to consider a list of features, from service area and scheduling convenience to certifications and additional services offered. Here are some key factors to help with vetting potential companies.

Service Area

While there are many reliable chimney cleaning services on the market, not all will offer services nationwide. Before considering other features such as emergency availability and inspection, it’s a good idea for homeowners to first check whether the company they’re vetting offers services in their area. Searching for “chimney sweeps in my area” should bring up a list of local service providers that a customer can consider.

For instance, many chimney cleaning services cater to specific regions rather than all 50 states. Even if a company does cover their area, homeowners will want to factor in whether the services are within a convenient distance in case of an emergency. Once they know a company is available and close enough to cater to their chimney cleaning needs, homeowners can begin considering other features of the company.

A good chimney cleaning service will offer convenient, flexible scheduling options and have an associate available to help, especially in an urgent situation. If a company is booked for weeks or months in advance, a homeowner might consider looking elsewhere to get the job done.

However, there’s always the option for homeowners to book far in advance and regularly (at least once per year, as recommended by professionals). Therefore, if a company’s scheduling is easy to navigate and allows bookings to be made in advance, this might be a good option.

Emergency Availability 

If a homeowner notices cracking or popping noises in their chimney, thick smoke coming from their flue, or other indications of a chimney fire, it’s imperative to seek emergency support. There might also be less serious (but still noteworthy) signs a chimney needs immediate cleaning and inspection, such as strong smells or black chimney walls.

In cases like these, it helps to hire a chimney sweep service that can make itself available in an emergency. Otherwise, a home could end up with permanent damage or worse. Homeowners will want to find a company available in such situations to prevent avoidable chimney problems.

Chimney inspections are just as important as chimney cleanings, as they ensure a chimney is in good condition and safe to use. Finding a company that offers chimney inspections on top of chimney cleanings is a bonus many homeowners may want to consider. Since many common symptoms of more serious issues, such as cracked mortar joints or melted crowns, go undetected by homeowners, having a professional take a look and provide their expertise is vital. Scheduling chimney inspections on a regular basis (like every spring, as recommended by professionals) will help homeowners feel safe and worry-free after a season of chimney use. Chimney inspection costs may run a bit higher than standard cleaning services, averaging about $450.

Certification

Hiring a chimney cleaning service that employs experienced and certified professionals is necessarily for homeowners to ensure their chimney’s proper care and upkeep. If a chimney is not cleaned correctly, it can cause dangerous problems, from house fires to carbon monoxide poisoning. When deciding which chimney cleaning service to go with, homeowners are encouraged to value professionalism and credentials over price. Even if a company might be more affordable, if its workers are not experienced in chimney cleaning, it’s likely not a worthwhile investment. Some of the best and most common certifications to look for include:

• Certified Chimney Professional (CCP): This certification is intended to fortify an experienced chimney professional’s knowledge and show that they have attained a professional level of understanding of the codes, standards, and practices of a Certified Chimney Professional.
• Chimney Safety Institute of America (CSIA): The goal of this certifying body is to reduce fire risk and promote chimney, venting, and clothes dryer safety through education, not just for industry professionals but for homeowners as well.
• National Chimney Sweep Guild (NCSG): This community of professionals leads the chimney and venting industry by promoting the highest level of safety, integrity, and skill when serving American homeowners.
• National Fireplace Institute (NFI): A professional certification division of the Hearth, Patio & Barbecue Education Foundation (HPBEF), this organization’s objective is to increase public safety by establishing meaningful credentials for professionals who plan and install residential hearth appliances and venting systems.
• National Fire Protection Association (NFPA): This organization offers multiple types of certifications for professionals involved in fields with electrical, fire, and related hazards.

Additional Services

Many companies offer additional services, including dryer vent cleaning, HVAC, duct cleaning, and fireplace installation. If a homeowner is considering more than one home service, such as a chimney cleaning and a dryer vent cleaning, it may make sense to schedule both services from one company.

When vetting potential chimney cleaning companies, homeowners will want to assess their home’s maintenance needs and look for bundles or deals on those specific services. They can then weigh the additional services provided with the costs associated to determine the best fit for their unique needs. Having an all-in-one service can save money and time while ensuring a safe experience when using a fireplace and other utilities.

Customer Support

Customer support is an essential part of any business, but it’s significant for service-based companies. If a chimney cleaning service does not have good customer support, it can be challenging to schedule appointments or get through to a professional with any questions or concerns. Homeowners will want to look for a company that offers easy and efficient communication, either online, over the phone, or both. Also, it’s a good idea to keep in mind how long it takes for a customer service agent to get back with an estimate or date of service to get an idea of the quality of their customer support.

Our Top Picks

We researched dozens of chimney cleaning services on the market to find the best ones for homeowners. After vetting companies to learn about their certifications, additional services offered, and customer support, among other considerations, we narrowed our options to four businesses that provide quality services. Here are our top picks for the best chimney cleaning services.

Why It Made the Cut:

Midtown Chimney Sweeps uses an innovative cleaning method to minimize mess while thoroughly cleaning a chimney, and the company also services freestanding gas fireplaces and wood stoves.

Midtown Chimney Sweeps is a great option for homeowners looking to invest in professionals who have the proper experience and hold the correct certifications (CCP and NFI) to get the job done. Services are available in California, Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Canada.

This chimney cleaning service offers convenient online and phone-based scheduling for its “revolutionary” cleaning method. The company says it delivers a deeper clean without the mess using its HEPA centrifugal-gravity, dust-extractor vacuum. Technicians can also service both freestanding gas fireplaces and wood stoves in addition to traditional gas or wood-burning fireplaces.

While prices can be relatively high, the quality that homeowners receive in return is worth the investment. Midtown Chimney Sweeps also provides helpful resources and articles on its website to customers for free. These resources include fireplace maintenance tips and ways to keep the home warm during the winter months.

In addition to chimney cleaning, Midtown Chimney Sweeps offers additional services such as fireplace installation and dryer vent cleaning. This can be helpful for homeowners who want to deep-clean their entire home’s heating system at once when they book a routine chimney cleaning.

• Service area: 11 states and Canada
• Scheduling: Online, phone
• Emergency availability: No
• Certification: CCP, NFI
• Additional services: Fireplace installation, dryer vent cleaning
• “Revolutionary” cleaning method delivers deeper clean with less mess
• Helpful resources and articles available on the website for customers
• Technicians can service freestanding gas fireplaces and wood stoves
• Prices are relatively high compared to the national average

United Home Services is a certified chimney cleaning company that offers 24/7 emergency availability to homeowners in need.

Available in five states (Colorado, Kansas, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington), United Home Services provides chimney sweeping as well as HVAC installation and repair, dryer vent cleaning, insulation, garage door repair and installation, and roofing services. Its most attractive benefit is the company’s 24/7 emergency availability. While each location is franchised, meaning the customer service quality and responsiveness may vary among branches, homeowners may enjoy additional peace of mind knowing that technicians are available at any time in case of an emergency.

United Home Services’ advertised prices are lower than the national average of $255, making it a good option for homeowners concerned about how much chimney cleaning services cost. The company is NCSG certified and provides chimney cleaning, chimney relining, bird and animal removal, smoke-problem correction, safety inspections, rain leak repair, brick and chimney crown repair, and flashing repair. To book an appointment, homeowners can visit the company’s website or get in touch by phone.

• Service area: 5 states
• Emergency availability: Yes
• Certification: NCSG
• Additional services: HVAC installation and repair, dryer vent cleaning, insulation, garage door repair and installation
• 24/7 emergency availability
• HVAC, insulation, and roofing services available
• Prices are relatively low
• Quality of service can vary by location

Flue Tech Inc.’s certified master chimney technicians can tackle any cleaning job or complex repair a chimney may need.

Flue Tech Inc. is a chimney cleaning, repair, and ventilation service that holds various certifications, including CSIA, NCSG, NFI, CCP, and NFPA. All technicians are certified master chimney technicians, which requires at least 8 years of experience and 6 years of certification. This extra level of certification, along with technicians’ other third-party certifications, ensures a higher level of quality and experience. For customers who require more extensive chimney cleaning or repairs, this extra level of expertise may be an important deciding factor.

Service hours for customer service and technician visits may be more limited than some homeowners would like. The company is available Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. The company offers convenient online or phone scheduling and provides discounts to customers who sign up for an annual service plan. These discount opportunities could help homeowners reduce the cost of ongoing chimney maintenance in the long run.

Available in three states (Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York), the company also offers air duct cleaning, dryer vent cleaning, and fireplace installation. However, among its most attractive qualities are its chimney inspection and repair services, which ensure a homeowner’s chimney is in a safe condition for use.

• Service area: 3 states
• Certification: CSIA, NCSG, NFI, CCP, NFPA
• Additional services: Air duct cleaning, dryer vent cleaning, fireplace installation
• Certified by CSIA, NCSG, NFI, CCP, and NFPA
• Technicians are certified master chimney technicians
• Discount offered to customers who sign up for an annual service plan
• Service hours are relatively limited

Best Aggregator

Homeadvisor.

HomeAdvisor allows potential clients to browse local professionals based on the project and compare pricing and other features.

HomeAdvisor is an aggregator that lists services nationwide, bringing homeowners the best options in their area. Users can filter their searches based on the project and location to browse local professionals. While its website doesn’t include information about third-party certification, it is streamlined and easy to navigate. With a high-quality user experience, the HomeAdvisor site can help homeowners quickly find local professionals who are qualified to take on their chimney cleaning or repair jobs.

All scheduling is done online, and emergency availability, certifications, and additional services vary by provider. While homeowners must provide their name, phone number, and email address to browse local chimney sweeps and other professionals, through HomeAdvisor they can immediately find trusted professionals providing services in their area.

• Service area: Nationwide
• Scheduling: Online
• Emergency availability: Varies by provider
• Certification: Varies by provider
• Additional services: Varies by provider
• Potential clients can filter by project and choose from local professionals
• Website is streamlined and user-friendly
• Name, phone number, and email are required to browse local services
• Website does not typically include info about third-party certification

Our Verdict

The Best Overall award goes to Midtown Chimney Sweeps due to the company’s thorough cleaning method, helpful online resources, and ability to service freestanding gas fireplaces and wood stoves in addition to traditional fireplaces and chimneys. United Home Services is our pick for Best Emergency Services, as this certified company offers 24/7 emergency availability within its service area as well as relatively low prices for chimney cleaning services.

How We Chose the Best Chimney Cleaning Services

When deciding which chimney cleaning services were the best picks on the market, we considered various features including customer service, certifications, inspection, emergency availability, scheduling, service areas, and additional services provided. For instance, some of the companies we picked also offered air duct cleaning, dryer vent cleaning, fireplace installation, and other services. We also considered the overall price and any potential deals worth pursuing.

We reached our verdict only after conducting extensive research on dozens of chimney cleaning services. Our best picks are highly qualified, affordable, and reliable options that will care for customers’ chimney cleaning needs.

Before You Hire One of the Best Chimney Cleaning Services

Before hiring a chimney cleaning services, it’s essential for homeowners to understand that these services and companies aren’t suited for everyone, as every homeowner has different needs for their chimneys and fireplaces. Additionally, some of the top picks only offer services in specific states or regions, meaning they might not be available to homeowners across the country. This is an important consideration to keep in mind before blindly choosing a company.

Homeowners will also want to be mindful of their budget and what exactly they’re looking to get from a chimney cleaning service—is it just a routine cleaning, or will they require additional services inspections and emergency availability? After weighing the costs of professional services, some homeowners may decide to clean their chimney themselves. This can be a difficult DIY job, though—it’s messy, potentially dangerous, and requires specialized equipment such as chimney brushes. Those with a fear of heights, in particular, may want to consider hiring a professional, as chimney cleaning will require them to climb onto their roof.

A more practical DIY job that homeowners can take on is cleaning their fireplace . Although a messy job in its own right, this is a much easier task for any homeowner to tackle, and it doesn’t require any special tools—although they may want to use one of the best creosote removers to fully get rid of any creosote buildup.

Cost of Hiring One of the Best Chimney Cleaning Services

How much does a chimney sweep cost? Chimney cleaning costs can typically range from $130 to $380, with the national average being $255. The price may vary depending on the state of the chimney, including how long it’s been since it was last cleaned, how often it’s used, its accessibility (steep roofs make for a more inconvenient and dangerous cleaning), what other services are being offered (inspection, fireplace installation, etc.), and whether it needs certain repairs. When creating a budget and vetting potential services, homeowners will want to keep all this information in mind.

The Advantages of Using One of the Best Chimney Cleaning Services

When a homeowner hires one of the best chimney cleaning services, they’ll receive professional, reliable service and thorough cleaning for their home’s chimney or fireplace. The best companies are certified and insured and offer chimney repair if any issues are found. Some other benefits include:

• Thorough cleaning methods to ensure a deep clean that improves a fire’s burning quality, reduces the risk of danger from creosote buildup, and minimizes any mess;
• Experienced technicians who can inspect and clean multiple types of fireplaces and stoves; and
• Additional services for HVAC systems, roofs, insulation, and ventilation to improve the overall state and condition of the home.

Chimney maintenance may not always be top of mind for homeowners until something goes wrong that requires expensive repairs. That’s why it’s important to keep up with routine chimney cleaning and maintenance year after year. Knowing what to look for in a reliable chimney sweep company isn’t always clear, though, as many homeowners are unfamiliar with these services. The answers to some of the most frequently asked questions regarding professional chimney cleaning services can help homeowners decide which chimney cleaning and repair company is right for them.

Q. How much does it cost to hire someone to clean my chimney?

Professional chimney cleaning typically costs between $130 to $380, with the national average being $255. Costs will vary from one company to another, so homeowners may want to search “chimney service near me” to compare prices between local chimney cleaners.

Q. When should I use a chimney cleaning service?

It’s recommended that homeowners use a chimney cleaning service at least once a year to ensure their fireplace is safe and clean. If homeowners notice a buildup of soot or a strong odor when burning fire, they will want to also contact a company for chimney and fireplace cleaning services.

Q. What do chimney cleaning services include?

Chimney cleaning services typically include a chimney sweep and basic inspection to check for any signs of damage.

Q. How often should I have my chimney professionally cleaned?

Professionals recommend homeowners have their chimney professionally cleaned at least once a year.

Q. What time of year should I clean my chimney?

It’s a good idea for homeowners to hire chimney sweepers to clean their chimney in the spring following colder months, which is when chimneys get the most use.

Q. How can I tell if my chimney needs cleaning?

Some common signs a chimney needs cleaning are a buildup of soot or a strong odor when a fire is burning. Homeowners will also want to look out for water buildup and other signs of a leaking chimney , which may require flashing or mortar work to fix. In those situations, they may want to hire a chimney repair professional near them to address the problem before it worsens.