Simple rules to elevate trustworthiness of your website
Artem Rudenko
CEO, Founder
Making your website come off as trustworthy is critical for user retention and engagement. First impressions matter, because users often decide within the first few seconds whether to stay on your website or leave it. In this post, we’ll discuss guidelines you should follow to make users trust your website and brand.
Performance
Slow websites create frustration, reduce credibility, and increase bounce rates. You simply lose opportunities by not serving website pages fast enough. Therefore, you should strive to have your website load as quickly as possible. You should also ensure the loading experience is smooth — for example, that content does not jump around as assets load in.
Website performance can be seen as a sign of professionalism and reliability for your company, so it’s important to get this right. Keep in mind that in most cases performance can be improved incrementally. It’s usually fine to follow general performance guidelines during the period of development, and then tweak it to acceptable level in the final stage.
Design
Your website’s design greatly influences user perception of your brand and product. You should aim to create an aesthetic that is modern, clean, and purposeful. Outdated designs that look like they’re from the 2010s reduce trust, unless you have a well-established brand already.
Like with performance, attention to detail in your design contributes to making your brand feel reliable. Therefore, you should aim for high consistency in your design, and ensure the design is relevant to the content.
Assets
Low-resolution images and other assets damage your credibility by making the website feel cheap or cobbled-together. To combat this, ensure you use SVGs for any graphics, like icons or illustrations, over PNG images whenever possible. Using a vector format like SVG also tends to improve page load time.
On the other hand, high-quality heavy assets can directly affect website loading times. Modern continuous integration pipelines used by engineering teams to deploy code to servers enable the automatic conversion of graphical assets, improving page load times, while keeping quality at a decent level.
Having questions? Talk to us.
Quality Assurance
Proper QA can prevent bugs and rough edges from making it to production. Bugs and broken elements on a page are perceived by users as a sign of neglect, which has a significant negative effect on trust.
For QA to have the highest impact, it should also ensure that:
- User flows (e.g. conversion flows) are smooth
- The website uses a responsive design that looks great on all screens sizes
- The website is fully accessible
- Pages' loading times fit an acceptable range
Conclusion
To build user trust, you need to have a high-performance website with a clean, modern design. Optimizing for these qualities puts the user in the right frame of mind to engage with your content in a meaningful way. To ensure the website stays in tip-top shape, it’s important to invest in continuous improvement and maintenance.