Before you invest in testimonial sections

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. Before you spend anything on testimonial sections, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• A specific quote beats five vague ones
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

Warning signs

Names, roles, and companies make quotes credible. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Unattributed praise reads as invented. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

What this looks like day to day

Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. Three things worth confirming about testimonial sections before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Names, roles, and companies make quotes credible — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.