Your website is the online face of your organisation. You need it to make a good impression and establish as much trust as you can with your web visitors to convert them into paying customers. However, trust goes beyond short-term goal conversions as it ensures your customers come back to you for repeat business as well as helping you generate referrals.
You can build trust with your web visitors through your content, web design, and web development. To create a trustworthy WordPress website, we recommend you do the following:
Invest in professional web design
Investing in professional design reflects your professionalism and commitment to your organisation. How your organisation looks visually online is a direct reflection of what your customers can expect from you. Strong branding shows your confidence in who you are and what you offer.
Design allows you to showcase your organisation’s personality and reflect what your visitors can expect from your products or services. For example, youthful brands benefit from using bright and colourful colours and energetic typography. We also recommend avoiding red colours, as these send up a warning signal to potential customers.
Credible copywriting
The way you write your content will have a direct impact on how your business looks. A trustworthy organisation is approachable and friendly, and your online content should reflect this. The language you use, the type of advice and information you provide, and when and how often you update your website all work together to build a trustworthy professional persona that reflects your level of customer service.
Be honest
A trustworthy organisation is not afraid to be honest and tell the truth. You can do this in the following ways:
- Admit when you are wrong. This can come in the form of a blog post updating your customers that you messed up and what to do about it.
- Apologise for service disruptions. For example, if the delivery of your products was delayed due to an influx of sales or bad weather conditions. Customers will understand if they are told.
- Don’t exaggerate. For example, you don’t want to exaggerate a product’s features and performance, that only creates disappointed customers. Instead, be honest and state the facts, leaving the opinions up to the customer.
Be transparent
Trustworthy organisations have nothing to hide. For example, charities benefit from showing what percentage of a donation goes to certain supplies, causes and marketing. Professional organisations can be transparent by acknowledging to clients when another company might be better at helping them with their needs. For example, we are experts in WordPress. If a potential client came to us looking to update their website with the Drupal CMS, we would refer them to one of our trusted partners who specialises in Drupal. Even if the potential client doesn’t become a customer of ours, they may have a friend looking for a new WordPress site that they can refer us to in the future.
Update your website regularly
Regularly updating your website shows that you are active and working. E-commerce sites can show this by continually adding new products, while sites of all kinds benefit from running a blog. Regularly posting new content is also important for SEO, as search engines prefer active websites.
Humanise your organisation
Humanising your organisation shows that there are real people behind the brand, giving potential customers an emotional connection to you. Showcase your personality, tell the story of why and how you and your team got into the industry, what your organisation’s mission is, what your passion is in your sector. Explaining who you are and why you do it provides a narrative that helps your potential customers understand (and trust) you. You can demonstrate this best on your About and Team pages, but your vision should be the first thing your potential customers see when they land on your website.
Tell your story on your About page
This is an opportunity to show your brand personality and the story behind your organisation. We recommend that you include:
- How your organisation came to be. Where did the idea start? What prompted the founder to start the organisation?
- How you have grown. Has your team doubled in size in the last year? Have you moved to bigger offices? Have you launched internationally?
- Whether you were started from scratch or were funded, there are benefits to both, and many organisations are proud of how they have funded their business. Mentioning this shows that you are open and builds trust.
- Include pictures of your workplace. Pictures of the outside are also useful if you regularly have customers visiting.
- Pictures of your processes. Illustrate the story behind your products and services through photography. You can include photos of how your products are created or include sketches of your design processes.
Show the people behind your brand on your Team pages
Show the real people behind your products or services so your potential customers can get to know you before they even do business with you. Add individual photographs and bios about each member of your team. Include:
- Their photo. Putting a face to the name is nice. Include a photo that shows their personality and what makes them unique.
- Their experience in the field. How many years have they worked in the industry? Have they been promoted since they joined your organisation? This is an indication of growth and success, and it encourages trust because it shows that you are not new to the field.
- Their speciality. For example, if you’re an accountancy firm and you have 10 very different accountants on your team, explain what they bring to the business by noting which area of accounting they specialise in.
- Any relevant qualifications. Any courses they have taken that are relevant and their most recent recognised qualifications from the education system. For example, you would include relevant university degrees for all levels, but you would only mention A levels for juniors and trainees if those were their most recent qualifications. Courses and workshops are also worth noting if they are relevant to their role or your organisation’s industry.
- Their personality. What do they do outside of work? What are their passions? This gives your audience something emotional to associate with.
- Their contact details. This is only relevant if they are senior members of the team and that information is already visible on your website. For example, you would want to include the email address or contact phone number of your wholesale manager that potential customers can get in touch with. Helping your visitors easily get in touch with someone on your team builds trust.
Have fun with the design of your About and Team pages, as these pages are where you can show your personality.
Develop your experience
Just writing about your experience is not enough for some potential customers. For service companies, you need to include a portfolio or case studies of previous projects and clients, or detailed testimonials.
We recommend that you include the following in your portfolio, case study or testimonial pages:
- Summarise the brief. What did your client want? Why did they come to you and not the competition?
- Demonstrate how you fulfilled the mission. Include resources, expertise, etc.
- Show your final work with pictures. Show how the project went to create expectations for potential clients.
- Include quotes from your client. Most clients will do this if they are impressed with the work you have provided and may have already provided you with some useful quotes in your correspondence.
Provide social trust
- Install a product review add-on. Perfect for ecommerce sites. Reviewers always enjoy commenting on the product, service and speed of delivery. Installing a review extension proves that you’re not afraid to hear feedback from your customers, which is an indication that you believe your products and services are top notch.
- Display logos of your most famous customers in the footer. If leading organisations trust you, it will encourage others to do so.
- Display selected quotes from regular customers. Include quotes from your best customers in selected places on your website.
- Add social media counters. These show how many followers you have and how often your products and blog posts have been shared.
Build trust through your website’s features
How your website functions and performs has a direct impact on the trustworthiness of your WordPress site. The following aspects ensure that trust is established:
- Ensure that certain features work as expected. Predictability builds trust. For example, clicking on your logo should take you to the homepage. If the features don’t work as expected, it can create an uncertainty, which will make them wary of your business.
- A fast website shows that you value your customer’s time. It’s also a good reflection of your customer service. A quick online checkout gives an indication of fast delivery.
- Don’t disable right-click on your website. If you don’t trust your website visitors, how can they trust you?
- Install an extension for chat. Good customer service is built on communication. We recommend installing Chatlio or similar for WordPress. A chat extension that allows you to send instant messages between you and your web visitors.
Looking for more custom features? We can help! We have lots of experience building websites with custom functionality. See our case studies for more.
Trustworthy e-commerce
Asking visitors to trust you on e-commerce sites can be a bit more difficult because you need to demonstrate to your visitors that your site is safe to enter their credit card details on. We suggest you do the following to build trust on an e-commerce site.
- Use a well-known and trusted payment solution. We are WooExpert partners and build all our e-commerce sites with WooCommerce, which offers PayPal and Bank Transfer as trusted payment methods by default.
- Add trust symbols in the footer. This includes recognised secure payment symbols in the footer of your website design.
- Use SSL (Secure Socket Layer) on your website. SSL is a secure link between your web server and browser and is a must for e-commerce websites.
- Include return and shipping policies. If your customer knows that they can return their product to you if they are unhappy with their purchase, they will be more likely to buy from you. The number of sales you make thanks to this will always make the return worth it.