Stellar - Star Rating for WordPress

Version 2.4.0 — 18 September 2026

• New Added lookup indexes to the ratings table, rating queries no longer read the whole table
• New Added a permission check, so that only administrators can reset rating data or import it from the Rating Form plugin
• New Added a verification token to the voting request, a request that arrives without a valid one is limited to a single vote per day
• New Added the stellar_trust_proxy_headers filter, for sites that serve visitors directly and want forwarded IP headers ignored
• Improved Rating value and vote count are now read with one cached query instead of several, on posts, top rated lists, the posts list screen and the dashboard widget
• Improved Top rated and overall ratings no longer query the database once per post
• Improved The ratings table is no longer inspected for missing columns on every admin screen
• Improved The rating scale is now taken from the settings rather than from the voting request, and a rating outside that scale is refused
• Improved Tightened the SVG upload sanitizer, and removed a deprecation notice it raised on PHP 8
• Improved The rating icon is now read from disk once per page instead of once per icon
• Improved Ratings, titles, links and settings are now escaped consistently everywhere they are printed
• Fixed Fixed the overall rating shortcode returning zero while multi voting is enabled
• Fixed Fixed the dashboard widget adding multi voting results to the single rating totals
• Fixed Fixed the rating refresh request answering with the first voting item instead of the rating of the post
• Fixed Fixed a fatal error on sites where every rated post adds up to a zero rating
• Fixed Fixed notices raised by prepared statements that carry no placeholder
• Fixed Fixed a repeat vote adding a second vote instead of replacing the previous one
• Fixed Fixed the answer to a vote describing the rating as it stood before that vote
• Fixed Fixed the vote count answering zero while multi voting is enabled
• Fixed Fixed the rich snippet markup never reaching the page while it was switched on in the settings
• Fixed Fixed the JSON+LD markup breaking on a title containing an ampersand, a quote or a backslash
• Fixed Fixed the widget listing every rated post instead of the number of posts set in its settings
• Fixed Fixed the [stellar-rating] shortcode answering with the number of votes while multi voting is enabled
• Fixed Fixed the reset dialog reporting a success as an error, and an error as a success
• Fixed Fixed the vote limit treating every visitor behind a proxy or a CDN as the same visitor
• Fixed Fixed voting failing in a browser where site data is blocked, such as a private window
• Fixed Fixed a reset leaving multi voting results behind in the visitor's browser
• Fixed Fixed .svgz icon files being refused on upload
• Fixed Fixed the icons emptying when the rounding setting holds an unexpected value
• Fixed Fixed a stray closing tag in the dashboard widget while multi voting is disabled
• Fixed Fixed plugin settings being looked for in the wrong place on a multi-site network during uninstall

Earlier versions

• 2.3.2 (9 June 2026): 1 improved
• 2.3.1 (15 January 2026): 1 security
• 2.3.0 (4 August 2025): 2 new