5 ways to make your website more trustworthy to customers

A website is your shop sign and the best way to showcase your product to your customers so there is nothing more important than reassuring them that your website is safe to visit and ultimately, use to pay for your product.

Usually it can be difficult to distinguish the difference between a “safe” and “unsafe” website but there are some standout elements which all website owners should be highlighting so your customers feel secure when they are on the website. 

SSL certificate

The SSL certificate is very important in showing the customer that your website will protect their personal information. They are now very familiar with seeing the “lock symbol” on the search bar as so much has been said about using this for customer protection on Which?. 

The reason it’s imperative to have a valid SSL certificate on your website is because it protects the customer’s information when they are completing a transaction by encrypting the information whilst it’s being sent for verification to the other party. As more customers use your site and see this symbol they are more likely to go ahead and complete their transaction. 

Google SSO

With Google being one of the biggest and most trusted online brands having this functionality to support Google SSO will not only be good for user numbers but it will undoubtedly build that all important trust level. 

When you are a new company in the market this is a very important feature to help users’ numbers grow even if they are first time visitors to the website. Many companies now allow for this functionality as they’ve seen the benefit of quick, easy, and efficient sign up without a customer having to share details. It’s become second nature to us as consumers to see the symbol for login with Google SSO and it works very well with Chrome browser and that one-click login option.

Page loading time

Another indicator of a trusted website is the speed it takes for the pages to load. We can’t say that all the slow loading pages are not trustworthy as this is impacted by other things but we can say for certain that this is not a good sign. 

Page loading time should be viewed as a good health check for any site. Google also punishes websites that have slow page loading time by impacting their position on the search engine and lowering their ranking. Websites that are serious will of course do their best to change and improve this function on their site.

Ultimately, customers are not going to stick around on your website if it is loading slowly and might even start to mistrust your brand if it happens regularly. 

Domain monitoring

This has to be one of the most important things you need to monitor and protect. This is monitoring your domain to make sure it is not being hijacked by malicious threats online. Such events will damage the reputation of your brand so quickly and it will be a long while before you can go back to how things were. 

That’s why it’s important to use a domain monitoring service like StatusCake to help prevent this from happening to you. The other implication is a financial one with the potential loss of income from the domain hijacking costing. 

Showcasing customer reviews

Another great way to build trust around your brand and website is to display any reviews from previous customers. This will allow new customers to view the experience your previous customers have had. You can either use well known review agencies to highlight this like Feefo, or G2 Crowd, as examples, or you can do your own. The main thing is that you give customers the opportunity to review the way you do business with customers. This is something you may have noticed with very large online retailers that focus a lot of attention on this.

These 5 things may not sound like anything out of the ordinary but they make such a difference when it comes to making your website and business look trustworthy in the eyes of your customers.