Jun 20 2026
It's finally here. Business plugin 2.0 - the release many of you have waited years for - is out, and it's the biggest update in the plugin's history.
Business Reviews plugin has always done one thing well: pull your Google, Facebook, Yelp and TripAdvisor reviews into WordPress and display them beautifully. 2.0 adds the half that was missing - a complete review analytics and statistics suite. It focuses on your Google and Facebook reviews, where the available history gives the plugin enough data to turn years of feedback into something you can actually read, measure and act on, right inside your WordPress admin.
This isn't a chart bolted onto a settings page. It's a proper reporting layer: time-series trends, period-over-period comparison, response-rate and response-time tracking, sentiment analysis, NPS, an interactive history navigator, and a one-glance all-time overview. Most of this post is about that suite - but first, a quick word on how it was built, because it's part of why it turned out the way it did.
This is the part we're proudest of, and it didn't happen overnight. The analytics suite has been roughly two years in the making - the data model, the metrics, the charts and the interactions were designed, rebuilt and refined over many iterations long before 2.0 shipped.
For the final stretch we put the finished system through an intensive, roughly two-week refinement push — and right in the thick of it, Anthropic released Claude Fable 5, its most capable model. We threw the whole analytics engine at it immediately: refining every metric and chart, stress-testing the calculations against real review data, and hardening the edge cases. Within days, access to Fable 5 was suspended — and it's still offline as of this writing — so that window was short, but we used every hour of it. Years of work to build it; a final sprint, sharpened by Fable 5 in the brief time it was available, to perfect it.
The result reads less like a small plugin feature and more like a dedicated, professional reputation-analytics layer - the kind you'd usually expect from a monthly SaaS product - living inside the plugin you already own. And you get all of it with 2.0.
2.0 gives you two complementary screens. The Overview is an at-a-glance, all-time snapshot that answers "are reviews working for my business?" in six cards - including a standout before/after comparison that shows your reputation's trajectory since you started using RichPlugins. The Analytics screen is the deep, interactive dashboard: slice by any time range, switch granularity, compare periods, drill into a single year or month, and read every metric in detail. Same data, two jobs. Let's start with the one you'll glance at most often.
The Overview is the all-time performance board. It renders every core chart in full, in a responsive multi-column layout, so you can see the whole story of your reputation in a single screen - no clicking required. It's the fastest way to show a client (or yourself) that reviews are trending the right way.
Each card pairs a headline number with its trend: your all-time Average Rating with an NPS indicator beside it; Total Reviews with new reviews per period and the cumulative total climbing over time; Response Rate; Response Time; a Sentiment split of every review that has text; and the classic 5★→1★ Ratings Breakdown.
But here's the card feature worth showing off. Several Overview cards include a "Before RichPlugins" comparison. Using the date you connected your account - marked on the relevant time-series charts by a dashed "Joined RichPlugins" line - the Overview splits your history in two and shows how each metric moved after you started managing reviews with the plugin: rating before vs. the lift afterward, reviews collected before vs. after, reply rate before vs. after (plus how many reviews are still waiting on a reply), and response time before vs. after. It's an instant, honest ROI story - especially powerful for agencies proving value to clients.
This is the centerpiece of 2.0 - a fully interactive dashboard built around four headline metrics, a main trend chart, a supporting column of mini-charts, and a toolbar that lets you reshape the entire view.
The four cards along the top aren't just stat boxes - they're the navigation. Each shows the metric's current value, a delta versus your comparison period (when comparison is on), and a contextual sub-line. Click a card and the big chart switches to that metric.
The headline is your true overall star average. The chart plots something smarter: the displayed rating over time - the cumulative average a visitor would actually have seen on your site at each point in history, not just that period's isolated score. The card's sub-line spells it out as a start → end figure (for example, Displayed: 4.81 → 4.95), so you can see exactly how your public rating drifted across the selected range.
Two series in one chart: New reviews per period (bars) and the Total cumulative count (line) marching upward - the clearest possible picture of review velocity, and how the pile grew.
Response rate is simply the share of your reviews that have received a reply - a quick read on how actively you engage with customers. The dashboard shows it two ways: Raw (the share of that period's reviews you've answered to date) and Average (your cumulative reply rate up to that point). The sub-line surfaces pending replies - exactly how many reviews are still waiting on you - so the metric doubles as a to-do list. A nice touch: replying to an old review updates that review's own period, so the history stays truthful rather than crediting today.
Response time is how long it takes you to reply after a review is posted - measured from the review's date to your response, then averaged. It's shown as Raw (per period) and Average (cumulative), auto-formatted into minutes, hours or days. Because faster is better here, the delta colouring is inverted - a drop in response time shows green.
Sitting on the Average Rating card is a compact NPS-style gauge. We adapt the familiar Net Promoter Score idea to star reviews: 5★ count as promoters, 1–3★ as detractors, and 4★ as passives. The score is just the share of promoters minus the share of detractors - passives don't count either way (NPS = %5★ − %1–3★) - and it lands between −100 and +100. For example, 96% five-star reviews against 2% one-to-three-star works out to an NPS of about +94. The needle runs from red (poor) through to green (excellent), so reputation health reads at a glance.
Every review with text is run through sentiment analysis (with automatic handling of translated text where available) and bucketed into Positive, Neutral and Negative. In the Analytics dashboard it's a single clean stacked bar with inline percentages; in the Overview it's a doughnut. It tells you not just how many stars, but how people feel.
The familiar 5★→1★ distribution, with counts and percentages per rating - so you can see at a glance whether your average rests on a wall of fives or a noisier spread.
This is where the dashboard stops being a static report and becomes a tool. Pick how finely time is sliced - or let it choose. Auto picks the right resolution for the range you're viewing: daily for short spans, monthly for mid-range, annual for long histories, even relabelling itself (for example, Auto (Monthly)) so you always know what you're seeing. You can also force Daily, Monthly or Annual yourself.
Granularity isn't just a dropdown - it's intelligent. Select a full year and the dashboard automatically drills down to a monthly view of that year; select a full month and it drops to daily. You get the right level of detail without fiddling.
A full set of quick presets covers the ranges you reach for most - Last 30 days, 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, Year to date, Last 2 years, Last 3 years and All data - plus a Custom range with date pickers for anything else.
This is the interaction we're proudest of. Below the supporting charts sits a compact all-history strip - a navigator showing your entire timeline at once. Drag across it to select a range, or click a year or month to jump straight to it. The dashboard reframes instantly to whatever you pick, with the selected window highlighted on the strip; selecting the full span snaps you back to all data. It's the kind of context-and-zoom control you expect from a serious analytics product, not a WordPress plugin.
Numbers mean more next to a baseline. Turn on comparison and the dashboard overlays a prior period - the immediately preceding period of equal length, the same period last year (the cleanest way to control for seasonality), or a custom range against any two dates.
The comparison is rendered the way the best web-analytics tools do it: the prior period is index-aligned to the current one - its points sit at the matching positions on the X-axis, drawn as a dashed line - while the tooltip still shows the real prior dates and the exact percentage change. Every KPI card picks up a green/red delta against the comparison period too (inverted, correctly, for response time). Under the hood the comparison range is computed with UTC-safe date math, including leap-year clamping, so year-over-year never drifts by a day.
Analytics is only useful if you can act on it. The dashboard includes a slide-out reviews panel to read and reply without leaving the screen. Filter by star rating, with text only, or not answered to zero in on exactly the reviews a metric is pointing you toward - those pending replies, for instance.
And replies come with help: an AI-assisted reply generator lets you pick a tone (formal, friendly, humble, fun, warm) and a length (short, medium, detailed), optionally add a signature, and draft a response in one click - then post it straight to Google.
A few of the decisions Fable 5 helped us land - the parts you don't see but feel. The charting layer is a custom-compiled bundle containing only the components the dashboard actually uses, so the payload stays small and the admin loads fast. The server does a single-pass aggregation of your full review history and caches it, so opening the dashboard is quick even with thousands of reviews. Carry-forward math keeps cumulative metrics honest: when a range starts in the middle of your history, the running rating, total, reply rate and response time are correctly seeded from everything before it. UTC-safe time handling means period bucketing and comparison ranges line up to the day. And it's multi-location aware - manage several connected profiles and view them individually or as a combined Summary.
The analytics suite is the headline, but 2.0 also brings the usual round of reliability work under the hood, including more dependable Facebook review counts.
Reviews plugin 2.0 is rolling out now. If you're already running the plugin, the analytics suite arrives with the update - open the Analytics screen in your WordPress admin and your entire review history is waiting, already charted. Years of reviews, finally turned into answers.
We're open for discussion and welcome your suggestions and feedback. Thank you very much for your attention!
