Five mistakes teams make with testimonial sections

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit testimonial sections.

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.

What to watch for

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• A specific quote beats five vague ones
• Names, roles, and companies make quotes credible
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Unattributed praise reads as invented. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Making it stick

In practice

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

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.