Top 10 Ways to Boost User Confidence in Your Website
User confidence can be defined as a trust that is established the first time a visitor arrives at your website from any source in order to browse for information, shop for products, or find out who you are as a brand.
There are hundreds of factors in play when someone is visiting your website for the first time. There is no possible way that you can satisfy everyone. But there are some things that you can do to gain the trust of most visitors.
These are the top 10 things I think you must do to build website confidence.
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1. Redesign Often
A website should not be treated like a vintage car.* I strongly believe in redesigning your website every two years. There are two main reasons for doing this. First, the technology, browsers and operating systems are evolving pretty much every two years. It’s always healthy to stay with the latest trends in website technology. Second, a newer-looking website shows that you are a healthy business that is investing in your website. If you expect your website to keep making money, then you must keep it looking healthy.
*Some smarties of the “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it club” counter this point by bringing up Craigslist and the fact that they haven’t redesigned since 1999. I just have one thing to say to them: “You, Sir, are NOT Craigslist.”
2. Make Your Site Easy to Navigate
If your website navigation was approved in an internal meeting between the business owner and marketing folks, you probably need a new nav. Come to think of it, that “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for” ballad by U2 might be a fitting soundtrack for a lot of sites out there.
Ensure that your navigation is user-based and not company management based. Find out what searchers and visitors are looking for (this requires keyword research and website analytics review) and make it easy for them to find those things. There’s no point in guessing, or doing whatever makes the marketing dept happy. The answers are there if you look for them. Good navigation increases user time on sight and removes frustration.
3. Use Photos
Like I always say, “Great photos make a great website.” It’s a lot harder to dazzle people with content alone. When in doubt, insert a great photo that is relevant to your business and matches the tone of the website.
4. Hire a Proofreader
Nothing will make you lose your credibility faster than website copy with bad grammar or typos. Your website viewers can be forgiving of minor errors, but it’s hard not to doubt your sincerity when you haven’t even taken the time to look it over. Skimping on quality when it comes to content often results in poor conversion, even for a visually stunning website.
5. Include a Detailed “About Us” Page
Who are you, and why should someone be buying your product or service?
There is no substitute for an informative About Us section on your website. People always want to know with whom they’re doing business. If you are not a household brand, be prepared to share information about the business’s owner/management with website visitors. This is an important step people often leave out, either because they think nobody cares, or because they are going through a Jason Bourne phase and are not sure of their true identity.
6. Make It Easy to Contact You
Do you have your phone number and address listed on your homepage above the fold? If the answer is no, you have a big usability problem. If someone feels like calling you up, you don’t want to miss out on the opportunity. Make sure the number is always at their fingertips.
Likewise, if you’re using contact forms, test them periodically to make sure they are working properly. There is nothing worse than losing an enthusiastic website visitor due to the contact info runaround. “Don’t call us, we’ll call you” never works.
7. Provide Testimonials
In this age of social media, people are extremely interested in what real-life customers have to say.
Honesty is the best policy when it comes to adding testimonials. Have a new website or service? Be patient, your time will come. Nobody can start with testimonials the day they start a business. But in time there will be at least one guy who thinks you have done a decent job: ask him for some genuine kind words. Getting a testimonial is like asking for a date. If you don’t ask, you will never get one!
Pet peeve alert! Please use the customer’s full first and last name. Nothing sounds more spammy to me than a comment saying that “Anita J” from Fresno had a great experience doing business with you.
8. Make Visitors Feel Safe
This is extremely important for ecommerce sites, as well as for lead generation websites. You can never convince me or anyone else to put their credit card information into a website that does not appear “safe.” Any security certificates that you have must be prominently displayed.
While playing Sherlock Holmes on one of my recent ecommerce website reviews, I was able to spot something elementary that was driving the bounce rate through the roof. The shopping cart URL linked into a page with the redirect message “Are you sure you want to proceed?” on all Internet Explorer visits. Once this was fixed, the client saw a 50% decrease in bounce rates right away. More Safety = More Sales.
9. Load Quickly and Quietly
Please make sure your website is not taking several seconds to load on a high-speed connection. You will annoy and alienate your visitors, who weren’t planning to give you that much time in the first place.
And, by the way, that website music thing is a really bad idea. Why? It increases load time (see above). It makes you look like you designed your website in the early years of the WWW. It embarrasses/outs your visitors who are browsing from work. (90% of them are at work, remember?)
iTunes does not have music on their website, and they have sold millions of songs! I rest my case.
10. Be Phone-Friendly
Please consider the growing army of not-so-poor website visitors who use Smartphones (iPhone, Blackberry, etc). Their numbers are in the millions and forever growing. Making sure a simpler version of your website is served to mobile visitors will help you gain credibility and loyalty with these ubiquitous users.
More details on mobile-friendly websites are coming soon.
This completes my list. Just doing these basics steps will keep you ahead of the game. I’ll close with an original quote from me: “Life and websites work best when they are kept simple.”
