6 Ways to Build Trust on Your Website
Written by Eshan Pancholi
Sep 24, 2018
Eshan is a Senior Content Marketing Specialist at Radix, the registry behind some of the most successful new domain extensions, including .STORE and .TECH. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.
6 Ways to Build Trust on Your Website
Trust is everything in the world of business. Since time immemorial, trust is the one fundamental principle on which businesses have been built and sustained through dodgy times. When you build a website for your business, you want your customers and stakeholders to feel the same sense of trust they have with your brand otherwise. Cyberspace is riddled with numerous fraudulent websites and hackers and so, the principle of trust is further amplified on the web.
If your customers feel that something is amiss or if they do not trust your website, they will take their requirements and business elsewhere. First impressions are everything and a website that comes across as secure and trustworthy will do wonders for your business. Winning your customers’ trust and respect in the first visit is the key to keep them coming back and build brand loyalty and a solid reputation.
However, to build trust for your business with your website requires undertaking smart steps and paying special attention to existing shortcomings on your website. Here are 6 ways to build trust on your website for your business:
1. Get HTTPS
HTTPS is one of the primary indicators of a secure website. Hypertext Transport Protocol Secure or HTTPS is now a critical security and data integrity feature for websites. HTTPS protects your website from spammy intruders that may tamper with the communications between your website and your users’ browsers.
Intruders primary include malicious cyber attackers, legitimate but intrusive companies, hackers, and other cybercriminals that intend to steal sensitive data from your website’s visitors. Websites that use HTTPS normally have ‘HTTPS Secure’ written in the URL bar along with a padlock symbol just before the web address. This tells users that you care about their data and instills a sense of trust and security in their minds towards your brand.
2. Get a Smart Domain Name
Your website’s address plays a very important role in building trust for your business. Think about it, your website address is the first touchpoint for visitors to get an understanding of what to expect when they land on your website. A long, awkward, and hard to type or complicated domain name will make your website come across as somewhat flimsy or bogus.
Take for instance the example of Nebraska based Stately Shirt Company that shifted from www.thestatelyshirtcompany.com to a smart www.stately.store to denote their eCommerce business of selling shirts. A simple and short domain name that is easy to remember, easy to type, and free of any lingual errors goes a long way in building a stellar first impression and trust in the minds of your visitors.
Some of the domain extensions that you should explore are:
• .TECH for technology
• .STORE for retail and eCommerce
• .PRESS for media, journalism, content
• .ONLINE for online businesses, blogs
• .FUN for entertainment, travel, leisure
• .SITE for small businesses
3. Flaunt Testimonials and Reviews
Testimonials and reviews are both highly effective ways to build trust on your website for your business. A major chunk of your website visitors will make a purchase decision or trust your business based on the testimonials and product reviews. Displaying customer testimonials and product reviews assists new visitors and first-time browsers to get a sense of who you are and how you’ve performed and delivered in the past.
Showcase the best testimonials next to certain products or services to help your site visitors understand the true utility of what you are offering and to build a sense of trust for your business. Another great way of using testimonials and reviews to build trust is to host it on a third-party or aggregator website. Use Google reviews or your social media pages or Quora to get your customers to talk about you and share their positive experiences with your brand.
4. Display Social Proof
Have you ever driven past a restaurant that is always crowded with people waiting for a table? A sight like that always makes you wonder how good the food must be and that you should try it too. Well, that’s exactly how social proof works for your website. People will trust your business if you flaunt relevant numbers that can stir their minds.
For instance, let’s say you have 20,000 Twitter Followers and 57,000 Likes on Facebook. Anyone that visits these platforms from your website will most certainly consider your business to be trustworthy since so many people already follow it and trust it.
Furthermore, you can showcase your visitors’ friends and family that are connected to your brand on social media. For example, when a visitor lands on your website you can display information such as ‘Your friends Jason Brown, Jake Peralta, Harry Fork, and 100,000 people like our Facebook page’. Showing information like this builds social proof and trust for your business.
5. Show contact information
Showing your business contact information is an effective way to get customers and site visitors to trust you. By clearly displaying your contact details you’re showing that you’re open for people to reach you and are open to enquiries and feedback. Businesses that hide or don’t clearly display their business’s office address, email address and contact numbers come across as questionable entities.
Another addition to showcasing your contact information is to include a page on your team members.
You may have come across websites that have a ‘meet the team’ page. The reason for doing this is simply to add a personalized touch and to help your visitors gauge who they could potentially be working with. Connecting every team member’s LinkedIn profile will help your visitors to gain trust for your business as they know how experienced and competent your team is.
6. Sport a Slick Web Design
A clean, slick, super-fast, and modern design for your website can really be a game changer when it comes to building trust for your business. A website that is easy to navigate about and easy to figure out along coupled with cool new features implies to your customers that you are tech savvy and are active in your efforts to provide a superior web experience.
An outdated website that doesn’t do much to offer a fun web experience isn’t good for your brand’s reputation and doesn’t contribute towards building trust among your target customers. With so many intuitive web design templates now available on website builders such as WordPress, you should choose a slick design that is super-engaging and one that resonates with your brand tone.
Keep these 6 points in mind and your website will surely exude confidence to build trust for your business in the minds of everyone that visits it.
Guest blog by Eshan Pancholi