11 Ways to Make Your Website Trustworthy

Website trustworthiness is an essential factor in today’s business. When you look at top brands, you can notice how strong their user base is and how loyal their customers are towards these brands.

It’s because they have established user trust and maintained it all the way. No matter what industry you serve, gaining user trust is essential to take your website or brand to heights.

But why?

You already have a functioning website, quality products, services, and information, so why does it matter anyway?

Well, congrats on these, but they are still not enough. You see, there must be thousands of brands like you with similar offerings. Also, there will be fraudsters impersonating genuine brands.

So, in this advanced age, how will customers identify whether you are worthy of your trust or not?

This is why you need to ensure a few things and do something extra for your visitors to gain their trust.

In this article, we will discuss some pointers that can help you make your site trustworthy.

Let’s go!

Optimize Your Domain

Your domain name is the unique identifier for your website, and it’s the first thing the visitors would notice. It must be easy to remember so that people can easily access your site without confusion. Your domain name must not give a hard time to people that they miss spell it always and end up being frustrated and visiting other sites with an easy-to-remember address.

For this, keep in mind a few things:

• Go for a custom domain name instead of a subdomain like abc.wordpress.com. Using a custom domain name like abc.com adds a professional touch.
• Try keeping your domain name short and quick to spell without involving special characters.
• Use a quality domain extension such as .com, .net, .io, etc. instead of using .info, .science, etc. that many sites consider inferior or spammy.
• Choose the name relevant to your brand and the industry you serve in. It will help people understand what your site is all about essentially.

For example, if you want to create a fashion blog, you can go for a domain with relevant keywords like “style” or “fashion” and their variants. You could also use your name to make it even more personalized.

Add HTTPS for Security

Another thing to make your site trustworthy is using HTTPS in your domain name. It’s crucial as it makes your site more secure, and visitors with this knowledge may decide not to visit your site if HTTPS is not enabled.

So, what’s it exactly?

Let’s take the example of Geekflare. The site has the URL: www.geekflare.com, which is quick to recognize. But it also contains a critical component – https:// preceding the URL. This is a hypertext transfer protocol with s or without it for security. These days, adding www has become not that important due to a lot of ambiguity in the internet world; adding s to the http, that is, https, has become a necessity due to increased security risks.

Your site has http by default, so you need to make it https by installing an SSL certificate. It generates secure connectivity between a visitor’s browser and your web hosting server so they can exchange data safely. As a result, it increases the website’s trust as the visitors can easily see a green padlock for your website’s address, telling them the website is secure to visit.

Beautiful Yet Intuitive Design

Modern sites need to be beautiful yet intuitive to use to offer a superb visitor experience.

It’s like your house that you take enough time to decide the colors, designs, placing elements at accessible locations in the house, etc.

Your visitors would appreciate it if you could spare some time designing your site intelligently as it’s where they first land when visiting your site. For this, make sure to:

• Choose an attractive and useful design layout and theme that can offer flexibility to experiment with your design.
• Use relevant, quality images, videos, and other graphic elements in-line with your website’s objective.
• Design each page smartly with a clear description and highlighted CTAs that stand out and provoke people to click them. Make the website navigation smooth, so the visitors won’t face trouble moving from one page to another, keeping the aesthetics that does not overwhelm them.

You can also hire a professional website designer to add exquisite color combinations, logo, easy to read text, add placements, and other aesthetics for your site to amaze the visitors.

Improve Your Content

Okay, so you have designed your website superbly, but what about the content?

When visitors come to your site, they seek some information. It can be articles and blogs that can solve their problems, products or services they like to purchase, or anything else they came searching for.

Visitors will look for the information you have provided on your site, which is why you need to up your content game. Quality content will entice your users to be on your site and take the action you want them to, such as making a purchase, reading articles, clicking on affiliates, and so on.

Therefore, ensure to incorporate high-quality, result-driven content on your sites such as your about us section, home page copy, articles and blogs, product descriptions, and more. You can also create guides and ebooks for users to educate about your products or services or sell them if you want.

In addition, make your site as informative as possible and help users solve common issues by including an FAQ section and answering questions in a simple and easy-to-understand language. For this, you may hire a copywriter to write the content on your site in an engaging way and communicate your message effectively to your audience.

Furthermore, make sure you don’t have spelling mistakes or inaccuracies in your content. If you maintain a blog, post informative articles regularly and cite resources to make it authentic and research-based. Also, include relevant CTAs along with pictures in your content to make it engaging, attract users, and persuade people to take the desired action.

Enhance Website SEO

Even if you have the best design, domain name, and content, how will people know you exist if your website can’t rank in the search engines?

This is why it’s essential to increase your site’s visibility so people can find you easily when they are searching for information, products, or services that you provide. And this is where SEO shines. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) includes certain practices that help increase your site’s rank on search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc.

People nowadays go online to search for information on these engines before making a purchase or seeking guidance. If you rank well, more people will visit your site and get to know about you. And now, all the effort you have made can be paid off.

Search engines utilize three ways to decide site rankings – crawling, ranking, and indexing.

• Search engine bots crawl the web and find sites via links from other sites. Hence, you must start link building with other sites.
• After the bots crawl and find your site, they index it against thousands of other sites based on the content, keywords, relevance, uniqueness, multimedia, and links. So, include fresh content regularly with keywords and media to rank.
• Finally, the search engines rank your site by determining the best result against the given search. It is based on the authority and relevance of your content. So, include relevant content targeting your business or industry keywords that your audience is searching for.

Place Ads Strategically

Including ads on your site helps monetize your website; hence, you happily agree to use them.

It’s okay to do it if the ads are relevant to your site and might help your visitors find valuable products or services. But it can annoy them if you place too many ads or ads not appropriate for your audience’s interests. The worst of them all are pop-up ads that start playing out of nowhere, slow down web browsers, consume more data, and frustrate visitors.

And if you annoy them, guess what, you could lose them, which will affect your traffic and profitability. It’s something you would never want, so place ads strategically on your site. Here’s what you can do:

• Place 2-3 best ads that users can be interested in because if you add more, less space will be available for your content, for which the visitors have come. Design ads and banners that visitors don’t find overpowering your content or drawing too much attention that can scare them away.
• Never trick your audience, or you can lose their trust. Refrain from using the ads that look similar to your content that visitors end up clicking even if they don’t want to. Instead, differentiate the ads from content by incorporating some changes in space or colors.

You can also label the ads so the visitors can easily differentiate them by tagging them as “ads,” “sponsored post,” etc. It signifies that you are transparent to the visitors, and they can choose to click on it or not.

Include Testimonials

Testimonials do matter. They are proof that others have taken up your services, products, or collaborated with you on something and that they were happy about it.

It’s because fraudulent activities are everywhere, and nobody wants to be framed. By including testimonials, you prove that people can trust you with your information, products, or services.

Furthermore, genuine testimonials differentiate you from others and encourage people to take action with social proof. It also helps boost their confidence in your brand or website because they can witness how happy others were by choosing you. One thing to ensure, you must always include genuine testimonials, as the opposite can cause reputational damage.

For testimonials, you can do a few things:

• Ask your happy customers to provide you testimonials that you can publish on your site. Include their name, photo, and organizational capacity, if possible, to make the testimonial more authentic.
• Take user reviews and post success stories on your site. You can include case studies as to how you helped someone with your products or services. It will produce a stronger impact on the audience looking for similar help.
• You can contact popular, credible media sites to feature your products or services. It will also increase your visibility in front of a broader user base, which can help in more website traffic and conversion.

Link Social Accounts

Nowadays, almost everyone uses social media, whether they are customers or organizations. Popular social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn are easy ways to reach out to more people, connect with them, and grow your professional network.

Therefore, choose LinkedIn or other media sites that you are comfortable with and where your audience is. Create a professional account and stay active to constantly network with your industry people and engage with your audience.

Furthermore, add your social links to your website and include your website’s information on your social media pages. It can be a win-win situation for you because you can grow your audience base both ways.

For example, when people find you on LinkedIn, they can check your site’s address and hop into your site for more details. Similarly, if they have found your site, they can go to your social pages to check your profile there and see your authenticity. It works both ways and helps build greater trust with your audience.

Make the Contact Process Easy

Now, you have got everything in place. Your web design is superb, content and SEO are excellent, social links are added, ads are placed well, testimonials are there, but if you don’t provide the right contact details, it will be a trouble for visitors.

It won’t matter how much effort you have put in if the visitor can’t find the right way to contact you. They could go to other sites.

Therefore, make it easy for people to contact you if they have a query, issue, or seek more information regarding your offerings.

You can add your email address, phone number, and chat option if you like on the home page and your contact page. Design the contact page carefully, keeping it simple. Offer multiple contact channels so visitors will be comfortable choosing the best option for them.

Furthermore, include a quick contact form to help people reach out to you with their context. Make it simple and don’t ask too many questions as it can annoy the users who don’t want to share such information. You can simply ask for their name, email address, or the concern they are having so you get an idea of what they actually seek.

In addition, if you are a product or service provider, make sure to be available quickly through live chat or phone call, at least during business hours, if not 24×7 (although 24×7 is best). You can also keep an option to reach out through social media.

Be Transparent

Transparency is vital in the present-day business world attacked by fraudsters and opportunists. Whatever your policies are, how easy or stringent, you must communicate them clearly to your visitors. It will help them understand the way you work and prevent them from being in the dark.

For example, if you sell some products, present your return policy in a straightforward manner. It will help customers understand what will happen and what to expect when they want to return an item. It also prevents unnecessary friction that could harm your reputation. For this:

• Create a terms and conditions page highlighting all the policies you have for visitors and that they agree to them before proceeding further with your site.
• Also, create a page for privacy policy so the visitors can understand how you use their data. It will not only keep your visitors’ trust in you but also prevents risks related to compliance regulations and penalties.

Keep Your Site Up-to-date

All the above pointers would help you make your site trustworthy and are highly helpful during the construction phase. It will establish your visitors’ trust. And now you have one more responsibility – to maintain that trust.

And how do you do that?

You need to update your website regularly. By updating, I mean all the content in your site, including the web copy, creating new articles and blogs, updating the old articles, updating your privacy policy and terms and conditions if they change, and so on.

When you update your site, users can avail the latest information about your site, your products and services, articles, and how they should use the site.

If possible, you can also intimate the users via their email if you undergo some major changes that visitors must know to use the site more effectively, such as the terms of use. As a result, your visitors will feel you are concerned about them and their experience, and hence, they can remain your loyal users.

Conclusion 👨‍🏫

User trust is crucial in the modern business world. There are thousands of competing websites, including those that impersonate or are fraudsters. Hence, visitors look for trust and something extra that can differentiate you from the rest. And you can win their trust by following the above pointers we discussed. It will help you not only gain user trust but also maintain it in the long run.