19 Aug 12 Critical Trust Issues Killing Your Website’s Conversion Rates

With the cutthroat competition in the online market, the quality of your website plays a massive role in determining your ability to generate leads and eventually make sales.

However, if visitors doubt the legitimacy of your website, there is bound to be a noticeable drop in your conversion rates. You need to optimize your website to clear visitors’ trust issues.

But what exactly are these trust issues? Let’s take a look at 12 critical trust issues killing your website’s conversion rates!

1. No Contact Details

Whatever website you run, you need to provide your visitors with a means of reaching out to you for whatever reason they might have. Clear contact details give your visitors confidence when making any form of interaction. This is especially true with eCommerce websites.

Setting up a website without any contact details presents an aura of anonymity that can come off as shady to many of your visitors. Visitors want to feel like they are interacting with real people at the end of the spectrum. The best way to do this is by providing clear-cut contact information like emails, phone numbers, a mailing address, office address, and social media accounts.

2. Inactive Social Media Accounts

The world has now evolved to a digital stage where social media plays an undisputed role in lead generation and future sales. Website visitors are likely to search out your brand’s social media accounts.

If they can’t find any social media accounts for your brand or inactive ones, it might draw suspicion to your website and prevent sales. Your website needs to flow seamlessly with your social media accounts posting engaging and quality content regularly, all to build consumer trust and loyalty.

3. No About Page

In establishing your identity, a well-designed about-us page is the fastest way for a visitor to get familiar with your brand, what you do, what you sell, your history, and your team.

Letting your visitors know your core values and goals is key to building trust with your visitors ensuring they can put a face to your website.

Your about page should also be easy to find and include a call to action. About pages are a great way to generate leads, so don’t be shy to include sign-up forms and the likes.

4. Poor Quality Content

Content has become a powerful marketing tool. Many websites now include blog content in addition to their normal website info to build reliability and drive traffic. However, poor-quality content would do more harm than good to your brand’s reliability.

Content marred by bad grammar and punctuation makes visitors uneasy with your webpage. It’s advisable to hire an editor to ensure the quality of the work being put out.

Readers can quickly tell when an article has been written to target the Google search engine. You should create content that provides your audience with the information they need.

Finally, out-of-date content is also an issue. It would help if you update outdated facts in your articles, re-uploading or rewriting articles as needed.

5. No Security Certificates Or Trust Badges

You can quickly build the trust of many visitors by providing them with your certifications and reasons why you are qualified to do whatever it is you offer.

Take, for example, if you want to open a new bank account online, you would like to do so with a bank that makes it publicly clear its certifications and other information to show that they can provide such a service reliably. You can use antivirus logos and other badges to show that your website is safe.

You can also introduce trust indicators like a ‘privacy policy and purchase guarantee to show your visitors that you are dedicated to the quality of your services.

6. No Customers Reviews Or Feedback

Visitors love feedback and review. Everyone wants to know if someone else has tested a product to decipher if it does what is promised.

You should include a website section with testimonials from customers who have tested your products and have something good to say.

In addition, you can create a section where visitors can drop live comments and reviews. This also builds up customer trust in your services as statistics show that 88% of online consumers trust reviews like they do personal recommendations.

7. Generic Landing Page Name

Investing in a custom URL is the first step to building a trusted online presence. Your landing page name is the first interaction a visitor would have with your page, and you have to get it done right.

You need to have a custom URL if you plan to draw a stream of customers with your website, as it gives a more professional feel to your website, unlike a website with a WordPress domain address.

8. Site Speed

Your site speed also plays a huge part in your website conversion rates. Take, for instance, when a visitor makes a query on a search engine, they open three or four tabs to get the answers they are looking for. The one with the fastest load speed is what they are most likely to read first.

A study shows that a website that loads up in one second brings in 3x the conversion rate of those that take five seconds to load. There is a high chance that a visitor would leave your website if it takes too long to load. Slow site speed can come off as unprofessional, making it imperative for you to invest in speeding up your website.

9. Unmatched Landing Pages to Text Ads

With unbound marketing, there is a requirement of relevance for your posts. You have to ensure that the text used for your ads matches the content found on your landing page.

If your text ad differs from what is available on your landing page, visitors would be shy of whatever you offer since there is already an aura of mistrust via the content.

Looking at it from the marketing approach, it also works to your disadvantage. SERPs also take a look at the relevance of your content to determine the frequency with which it appears. If there is disparity, it can just give you a tough time using ads and could mean paying more.

10. Poor Quality Media (Videos and Images)

If your site lacks images and videos, it can be a huge deterrent for a lot of visitors. Simply including a video or an image on your website can boost your conversion rates.

More than this, it is not just about what you post but the quality of the image. High-quality images provide visual satisfaction that places trust in your brand and website.

11. Too Many Ads or Pop-Ups

If your website is bombarded with ads that cover the whole screen and take out a large portion of the viewing area, it might be lowering your website’s value.

Most internet users hate having to view ads, and it has been proven that many people pay for services like ad blockers to avoid viewing ads.

Introducing huge ads to your website can mean reducing your future site visits as visitors would not like to visit a website bogged down with ads.

12. Poor Web Design

Your website design is an intricate part of what makes your website what it is. Your web design gives a visitor their first impression when they open up your website. A visitor can decide to leave your web page due to its poor design without going through the content or copy you have put up.

You need to ensure that your design is fresh, up to date, visually pleasing, and provides an easy-to-navigate system that encourages visitors to browse and familiarize themselves with your website.