Ways to Make A Website Appear More Trustworthy
“A good first impression can work wonders” — J. K. Rowling
The trustworthiness of a website is a key factor in the assessment that newly landed visitors make before deciding upon whether or not to leave a website.
Luckily, there are numerous ways a website can give off a trustworthy impression. Below are a few, often overlooked, elements that can help move a website forward in the pursuit of theoretical perfection.
SSL Certificate
An SSL certificate is possibly the best way to make a website appear more trustworthy. Having one indicates that the information a visitor sends to the site (e.g. credit card numbers or passwords) is privately sent. It also bestows the coveted ‘https’ URL alongside a secure lock.
Best of all, you can get a completely free certificate from Let’s Encrypt.
Trust Badges
Trust badges help create the impression that a website is trusted by an authoritative third party. There are several trust badges available to select from. I use and recommend McAfee SECURE, which provides a modern, noninvasive, yet visible certification trustmark. Moreover, it’s absolutely free for 500 visits/month — a great solution for most websites.
The McAfee SECURE mark (seen left) can be clicked by visitors to open up a verifiable popup (as seen below). Brand names, like McAfee, are particularly valuable as they carry a lot of weight in increasing the perceptive trustworthiness of a website.
Social Validation Counters
Social counters (like the one shown below) can help increase trustworthiness by indicating that others have trusted a website enough to spread it via social media. Whether for better or worse, popularity is increasingly equated with credibility.
There are limitless (often free) ways to implement social media share counters. Among the most popular solutions are AddThis and ShareThis. There are also countless plugins available for WordPress sites.
Dynamic Footer Year
Having a year in a website’s footer is standard practice; take the text at the bottom of my personal website for instance:
Copyright © 2017 Adam Ramsey Akkach. All rights reserved.Now imagine it said:
Copyright © 1991 Adam Ramsey Akkach. All rights reserved.This would give an outdated perception to the website. Often, updating the year after New Year’s Eve arrives is forgotten about. This can however be solved with a dynamic footer year to ensure that the year is always up to date. All that’s needed is a bit of PHP or JavaScript.
On the server-side, this can be done with the following PHP snippet:
<?php echo date(“Y”); ?>Alternative, a browser-side approach would be to use the following JavaScript snippet:
<script type="text/javascript">
document.write(new Date().getFullYear());
</script>The accumulation of elements that contribute to a websites trustworthy perception is beneficial in helping better establish authority. All that remains to be done is implementation.
