When someone first visits your website, you only have a matter of seconds to make a lasting impression on them and with security threats on the rise, it’s important that they feel safe when exploring your website.
A study by the Baymard Institute shows that a customer not trusting a website is one of the largest reasons for increased shopping cart abandonment.
Here we discuss 7 ways to make your customer feel safer when visiting your website.
WEBSITE DESIGN
The first thing people will notice about your website is how it looks and how easy it is to navigate. People no longer have hours to spend looking through websites, so a modern, clean, simple, and professional-looking website is the first step in gaining your potential customers’ trust. It shows that you care about your visitor and their experience.
TEST EVERYTHING WORKS
Visitors will be put off by a website if a page is taking a while to load or if a link doesn’t work. It’s important to test your website to make sure that everything is in working order. Here are a few things to tick off the list:
- Check that all internal and external links work, including social media links and links to other pages
- Make sure that contact forms are going to the correct email address and not going into junk.
- Test your check-out process. Go through the check-out process yourself and make sure that it works and it’s not too difficult to understand or is long-winded so that people abandon the cart.
- Take out old information. If there is any information on your website that isn’t relevant anymore, take it out or replace it with something else that is up to date and useful.
SSL SECURITY CERTIFICATE
Every website should now have an SSL Certificate. Originally, data on the Web was transmitted in plaintext that anyone could read if they intercepted the message. For example, if a consumer visited a shopping website, placed an order, and entered their credit card number on the website, that credit card number would travel across the Internet unconcealed.
SSL was created to correct this problem and protect user privacy. By encrypting any data that goes between a user and a web server, SSL ensures that anyone who intercepts the data can only see a scrambled mess of characters. The consumer’s credit card number is now safe, only visible to the shopping website where they entered it.
INCLUDE CONTACT INFORMATION
A website that has contact information such as an address, email address, or phone number will be seen as more trustworthy than a website without this information. If you don’t have a physical address, you don’t have to add one but make sure there is at least one way for people to contact you.
USE TESTIMONIALS
Testimonials are a great way to gain the trust of a potential customer. It’s the best way to show that other people/businesses have used and approved your services.
PRIVACY POLICY
A Privacy Policy sets out why and how you collect and process personal data, how long it is kept, and what happens to it when it is no longer required.
Ensuring your privacy policy is readily available to anyone who deals with your business is part of complying with the transparency principle. It is a legal requirement that any organisation that processes personal data must have a privacy policy. This is the case even if your business does not have a website.
BUILD YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA PRESENCE
Building a social media presence is one of the best ways to build trust with your customers. A website will only show certain things to a potential customer. Your website shows your more serious side but a social media presence will show the more human side of your business. You can build more trust using your social media channels by interacting with your audience. You can use it to ask questions and start conversations.
If you have any questions regarding what we have discussed above or any aspects of Cybersecurity or running a problem-free IT environment, please feel free to contact us on 01245 208080 and we would be happy to help.
– By Justine Maher