Is your website trustworthy?

1 July 2020

Although it’s easier than ever before for anyone to start up a web-based business today, that doesn’t mean that you can embark on your entrepreneurial venture carelessly or haphazardly.

One of the key struggles in today’s digital age is ensuring that your website is as trustworthy as can be.

It’s a sad fact of life that there are many unscrupulous sites online, and prospective customers nowadays are always at risk of being scammed. For that reason, they will routinely lookout for indicators of a website's trustworthiness, before parting with their hard-earned money. And rightly so.

Here are a few tips for making sure that your website is trustworthy.

Transparency

Generally speaking, people will be far less apt to trust you if they have no point of connection to you, as a real living and breathing human being.

If your website exists in isolation, and the details of your business, and you, remain obscured and hidden, that will frequently be taken as a red flag – or, at the very least, will fail to establish a sense of rapport.

Practice transparency to enhance the trustworthiness of your website. Give some detail about the history of your company if the site is a professional one, and consider including a headshot and a bit of information about yourself, too.

A professional visual presentation

Anyone can put together a website in an hour or two, using a variety of free tools found online. But just because you can do things that way, doesn’t mean you should.

If your website doesn’t feature a slick and professional visual presentation, it will signal to prospective customers that you are an amateur and that you can’t necessarily be relied on to provide a professional service and an upstanding and rigorous degree of customer support.

Go the extra distance and have your site designed professionally to look its best.

A high degree of functionality

If your website is difficult to use and navigate and lacks basic quality-of-life functionality – such as being mobile device friendly – this will naturally put off visitors, while also signalling that you don’t have your ducks in a row.

Ensure that your website works well, in a technical sense.

Adherence to best security practices

Having a website properly encrypted as HTTPS, and abiding by other industry-specific security practices, is certainly something that the bulk of your visitors will tend to expect.

At the very least, failing to properly implement best security practices will make your site far more vulnerable to attack, while simultaneously reducing trust, and giving the impression that you might be operating a lacklustre if not scammy site.

Testimonials and reviews

If you run a business website, one of the best ways of generating a sense of trustworthiness is to include testimonials and reviews from satisfied clients and customers of yours – thereby “pre-approving” your site to new visitors, and demonstrating that you haven’t just arrived on the scene yesterday.

Of course, any testimonials and reviews you include on your site must be genuine, and you should include more information than just a small snippet and a first name and initial. Where possible, your testimonials should feature a headshot, a full name, a paragraph of text, and maybe a link to a personal or professional website.