07:54
Solar installers: your reviews are hurting you
This one’s a rant — on purpose.
Most solar websites technically “have reviews.” But almost all of them are doing it in a way that actively reduces trust rather than builds it.
Walls of anonymous text.
No photos.
No sources.
No links back to the original review.
They look easy to fake, and customers know it.
In this video, I explain why most solar reviews don’t work, what they’re missing, and why this is about far more than aesthetics. It’s about credibility, compliance, and competing with companies that are actually taking social proof seriously.
Reviews aren’t a checkbox.
They’re one of your strongest conversion assets — if you stop wasting them.
For context, this video was originally recorded on 8 January 2026, views & strategies may have changed since.
Featuring
Video transcript
Solar installers, your reviews suck.
Okay, today is going to be a bit of a rant. Eighty-six percent of you said that, out of all the content types, you’d rather I just get on here and throw some shade and explain what not to do, instead of politely explaining what to do. So let’s start there.
Stop treating reviews on your website like a checkbox exercise.
When I first decided to specialise in helping solar installers with marketing and demand generation, I did a fairly obsessive exercise. I went through well over a thousand solar websites across the UK, the US, and elsewhere. I looked at what I liked, what I didn’t like, and what actually felt trustworthy.
Out of all of those sites, there were maybe five where I genuinely thought someone had put real care, time, and attention into the website.
About 90% of them had some kind of testimonials or reviews module. And most of them looked like this: a wall of text, no customer photo, no avatar, no reference to a real project, no link to the original review source, and no indication that the review even came from a real person.
They look terrible. And more importantly, no one believes them.
The entire purpose of reviews is to build trust and social proof. These don’t do that. At all.
So don’t treat this as, “Oh yeah, I’ve got reviews on my site. Tick. Done.”
They’re not working. They’re not helping you.
Even big companies do this badly. E.ON, for example, sometimes falls into this trap. Yes, they often have a Trustpilot module higher up the page, which is much better—but there’s still a huge amount of room for improvement.
So what’s actually wrong with these reviews?
First, they could very easily be completely made up. Consumers are smart enough to know that.
Second, they don’t link to the original source. If you reference a Google or Trustpilot review, the visitor should be able to click through to that original review. That’s how they know you haven’t tampered with it.
If it’s just typed into your website, you could have edited it, removed lines, cherry-picked only the good ones, or excluded the bad ones. It looks like a wall of five-star reviews, when in reality you might have plenty of one-star reviews sitting elsewhere.
Many reviews don’t even feature a customer name. They’re completely untraceable. And even when names are included, there’s almost never a photo of the customer.
If I’m reading a review, I want to relate to that person. That’s the entire point. A review is essentially a referral. If I can’t see who they are, can’t see their home, can’t see the installation, I can’t think, “That looks like my situation. I might get a similar result.”
Without that, how on earth are you going to compete with our clients, who have something like this?
We call it a wall of love.
Each review pulls through the customer avatar from Google or Trustpilot. The source is clearly shown and clickable. You can go straight to the original review. And throughout the page, we weave in video reviews that we collect for our clients.
Go to Infinite Energy’s website. Go to their wall of love. Scroll through that page and tell me you’re not completely convinced that they do fantastic work.
That’s the entire purpose of reviews—especially video reviews.
And we don’t just stick them on one page. We weave them throughout the site. You’ll see them on thank-you pages after an enquiry. You’ll see them in carousels that scroll automatically. You’ll see prompts encouraging people to call immediately instead of waiting for a response.
This is only going to become more important.
We’re already working with a client who has EVPS accreditation. They were told that their old website wasn’t compliant because it didn’t show the source of the original reviews. It now has to show the source and ideally link back to it so it can be verified.
Sooner or later, MCS, HIES, and others will all require this.
So why wait until it’s mandatory?
Do it now while it’s a differentiator, not a compliance checkbox.
If you want a copy of the document we’re building, go to the link somewhere in this post or the comments.
And if you want the implementation of everything we talk about across all of our content, go through that same link. You’ll answer a few questions about your business—residential or commercial, install volume, ad spend, and so on—so we can see if you’re a good fit. If you are, you’ll be able to book a call with me and we’ll see what we can do.
Thanks for your time. Hope that was useful.
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