The company website opens a window on how the business operates. Moreover, 75% of customers claim that they judge the trustworthiness of a company by its site. That’s why businesses are looking for ways to build customer loyalty through their website.
In this article, we will focus on the top reasons why customers don’t trust your website and strategies that may change your site into a more appealing and customer-oriented business tool.
Poor UX and Website Navigation
If you don’t capture a user’s attention in less than a minute, you’ll lose them. However, some business owners still ignore the commonly known “the 59 Second Rule”. If you want to provide your users with positive experience, UX is important. It helps keep users loyal to your brand and defines how often customers visit your website and how long they stay there.
However, 97% of websites fail at UX. The most wide-spread issue is a slow loading site. 47% of users are not willing to wait more than 2 seconds for the page to load. That’s why you should work on your website to increase the website loading speed.
Another issue is related to complicated website navigation. Visitors may become confused with too many navigation options or unusual location of the navigation and search bars. There are also deep-rooted problems that may lead to the website poor UX or even crashing. Examples include:
- Empty files
- 404 page not found errors (broken links)
- Malware warnings
- Lack of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) styling or inability to fetch CSS files
- Failed DNS lookup (Please try again later)
The UX rules are simple: the website should be easy to use, easy to navigate, uncluttered and contain everything visitors need.
Lack of Info about your Business on the Website
Similar to poor UX experience, absence of contact details or lack of information about your company on the “About Us” page may also scare away your visitors. These pages introduce your overall company, its products, and thus, present the company value to potential and existing customers. If your site doesn’t have them, it may create uncertainty and doubt among new users. The absence of phone numbers, physical addresses on the Contact page also reduce trust to your website.
A good trick is to humanize your brand on “About Us” page by creating a compelling story about your company. Do it and you will see what impact it may have on your audience.
Obscure Terms of Service
The Terms of Use and policies should be present and easy to find on your website. If you don’t have them, you may lose potential visitors. Customers don’t usually read the policies, but they always notice if a website doesn’t have them. Moreover, having them on a website is required by law in most countries.
Lack of Customer Testimonials
Customer testimonials on your website help build trust as they show your prospective customers that other people have tried out your products and liked them.
However, some consumers might think that your testimonials are not genuine. In order to add credibility to the testimonials and show that the feedback is left by real people, it is good to accompany comments with photos of the customers who wrote the testimonial, their name, the name of the city/country they live in, etc.
Online business reviews on third-party review sites also contribute to building trustworthiness of your website. These reviews help customers know if a website, and the company that runs it, can be trusted. 88% of people trust online business reviews posted on platforms like Pissed Consumer, Trust Pilot, Yelp, ConsumerAffairs, SiteJabber, etc.
The Absence of Proper SSL Encryption
Setting up HTTPS and installing an SSL certificate on your website is important as it’s an indicator to visitors that your website is secure and trustworthy. Google Chrome and other leading browsers show a warning to users who try to visit a website that isn’t secured with a SSL certificate and HTTS connection. The HubSpot research showed that 82% of website visitors leave a site if they see “Not Secure” warning.
Double-check that your SSL certificate is valid and up-to-date. Incorporate it in your website if you don’t have one yet.
It’s not easy to earn trust on the web. Your website comes first in building trust between your business and visitors or customers.
Brands should pay much attention to the trustworthiness of their website, especially in the online space where a lot of brands compete for customers.
