How to boost your website visitors trust

Whether you're selling a product or service or solely providing information, it's essential to build trust among your website visitors. If they don't trust you, they won't spend money with you, and the information you provide will be viewed with suspicion or ignored altogether.

As an online business, it's essential to establish your brand as reliable and trustworthy. However, finding opportunities to do so can be challenging. It's one thing to make claims about your credibility and another to prove it.

Your website is often the first impression potential customers have of your business, and it also presents the perfect opportunity to demonstrate your trustworthiness. Of course, anyone can create a website and publish content. To gain a loyal following and convert visitors into customers, you'll need to establish and exhibit credibility as well.

Fortunately, there are multiple strategies you can use to build audience trust through your site. We'll share some of the best tips you can use. When we think about some of my favorite experiences with companies, there's one common thread that ties them all together: trust. 

Trustworthy business and website hallmarks are a high-quality design, a well-built website, and beautifully crafted content. But sometimes, your visitors need something that feels a little more tangible, something that proves your company doesn't just exist within the four walls of their viewing device. They want to know there are people behind the company they can trust to provide their product or service and that they'll be there if or when an issue or question arises.

HTTPS Protection

An SSL certificate and the resulting HTTPS web address provide business websites with a tiny but essential trust seal.

If you haven't got it already, HTTPS protection is a must. It affects your search rankings, and some browsers won't even let users visit a site without a valid certificate for their safety.

To overcome that block, users might be required to whitelist a site that interests them manually. Moving a site to HTTPS may seem tricky at first, but there are plenty of guides out there to help it along.

Customer reviews

If you want to show visitors that you have a trustworthy website, why not let previous users or customers share their stories and experiences? Displaying customer reviews humanizes your brand, and it also shows potential customers that other people have purchased a product or service from you and that your site is legitimate.

Most consumers read online reviews before purchasing a product. What's more, making reviews visible on your site can boost conversion rates. Not only can displaying reviews on your site build trust with your visitors, therefore, but it also increases the likelihood of conversions. By willingly showing reviews and ratings from previous customers, you're helping instill that confidence they need to convert.

The days of people falling for reviews hosted on the same website they're promoting are mainly behind us. However, they can still play a part, especially if the commendation comes from someone with a name or reputation of their own. However, nothing beats honest customer reviews from third parties.

If you run a Joomla-powered website, you should consider using the DJ-Reviews extension and allow the website users to write reviews and set ratings.

DJ-Reviews allows you to create your rating criteria for various content types and let your users write reviews and rate articles, DJ-Classified adverts and advertisers, DJ-Catalog products, and J2Store products.

Learn more about DJ-Reviews

About us page

A company information page is an essential factor leading to customer trust. If it is clear and correctly configured, it is an excellent source of information about the company for those seeking such information. Complete information consists of the company name, address, origin, and a list of people working there, as visitors to the site may want to know who is behind the brand.

Remember that people like to know who they are dealing with. By giving them a handful of credible information about your company, you increase the likelihood that they will engage with your brand. The 'about us' page should not be an element treated as a 'necessary evil,' but one to be proud of.

Social media section

Integrating social media into your website is a proven practice. Its primary purpose is to promote products, brands, or specific blog posts and the engagement between the company and the website visitors. Including links to your company's social media profiles signals to website visitors that your brand is as engaged as ever.

Social media is a great tool to stay updated with your customers. You can easily and quickly show people that you have an active online presence by regularly posting and replying to comments or responding to events and situations.

Customers often pay attention to whether social media is kept up to date, and regular tweets and posts let them know that your website exists and is up to date, which also increases trust.

We have a proven free social media solution for Joomla websites: DJ-LikeBox.

It's a simple Joomla module purposed for displaying a Facebook Fan Box, Facebook events, Facebook Messenger on your website.

This widget can be displayed in a Joomla module position or a single Joomla article and used for entirely different purposes in different website areas.

Learn more about DJ-LikeBox

Multi-Channel Contact

If you run a website that sells products or services, people like to know that they can contact you if they have questions, and more importantly, if something goes wrong. Consider how visitors can get in touch and develop different contact channels throughout the site to meet these requests.

Contact points include contact forms, live chat, a company phone number, email, links to social channels, and a postal address.

By offering visitors a visible path through which to contact you, they don't have to worry about where the company is located, who is standing behind the site, and whether their requests will be answered at all.

Terms of use page

Having a subpage with terms of use provides clear information to visitors, and this is because they have an overview of what rules you operate under. This page can contain privacy notices, service/product warranties, rules, and regulations.

The benefits are twofold, as visitors to the site receive a reliable set of information, and you have a basis for enforcing your rights in the event of a breach of policy or misconduct.

Fix broken links

Regularly updating the appearance of your website and the content on it is a fundamental strategy. If you delete a subpage and forget to remove the links leading to it, there will be one or more broken links. Visitors who click on a broken link and see a 404/error page may think of your site as untrustworthy. It's a good idea to be aware of broken links and monitor their status and location. To do this, it is worth using free website monitoring tools. This way, you can quickly identify and resolve any problematic links.

Conclusion

Trust is more important now than ever, and customer experience is vital for business and SEO. If you want your website to achieve its goals successfully, you need to ensure it is trustworthy. If visitors aren't convinced that they can trust your website, they won't be inclined to interact with it or make a purchase. Practically everything determines that from your site's graphic design and its security and loading time.

What is your goal? Ideally, visitors don't need additional convincing to stay because they have all the evidence they need in one place - your site works perfectly, you have respected partners on your side, and you are transparent in the way you do business.
Building trust among your site visitors requires a multi-faceted strategy. We hope our tips will help you with that.