The Secret Sauce To Increasing Website Trust With Design

At First Glance

The first impression becomes a major deciding factor that happens in a split second. In the blink of an eye, people make a judgment on their perception of you and your business. They can either become just a viewer or a potential customer.

dynamic lightning beams made with AI

Competition Is Everywhere

The chance of you getting a second look online becomes very low because of how close your competition is. Your competition is only a click away.

There’s competition all around us. Business is one of the hardest sports in the world. You’re competing 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

For example, If you search “Gym near me” on Google, you will get several pages of results of gyms, studios and fitness centers around the area. So why would someone want to choose your business? What can you do to give yourself an edge in today’s digital world?

Impress + Convert = Lethal

Matthew Capala, the author of The Psychology of a Website, said that between 70–90% of people who land on your website will never come back. People will argue that not having an appealing, professionally looking website is okay not to have as long as it’s converting.

Which I disagree to a certain extent. Yes, conversions are a high priority BUT if you have ideally one chance to impress people with your website to stay a little longer which gives you a better chance to convert them into customers then why not do so?

PLUS, if you can get them to stay longer, even if it’s just for a couple of seconds, this helps tremendously with SEO and Google ranking. Google looks at “time spent” on a website as a signal measure for trust which is one of the three biggest metrics they use for rankings.

You don’t have to have an insane amount of colors, gradients, tons of interactions or crazy 3D illustrations. Just do enough to impress your viewers, set up your CTA button strategically for conversions and see the results pour in. Impress + convert = lethal weapon for your business.

This Is What To Do

It just needs to look good, be polished, feel professional, perform fast and convert high. This does a couple of things:

1) It gains the trust of potential customers without you even lifting a finger

2) It makes a good first impression become seamless and immediate

3) It gives you an edge over competitors that don’t have similar standards

I recommend you snoop through your website and be brutally honest about its current state. Give yourself a scale from 1–10. 1 being it needs a lot of work… to 10 being a top-tier website in the industry.

Here’s a list of things I recommend looking for:

• Does it load fast when you first land on it? Or does it lag?
• Are images blurry or fuzzy? Gives off low-quality
• Is the text legible? Is it hard to read? too small? no color contrast?
• Is your headline vague? Should be clear and unique to who target
• Is your branding consistent throughout your site? Should be cohesive

Here’s a list of things I recommend to do:

• If you’re website lags to load, it may because it’s too heavy, bad hosting, large images or other items that prevent it from loading fast. Remember we want to make an impression and a speedy service can be part of it. Test your site performance here https://pagespeed.web.dev/
• Logos and icons should be uploaded as SVG files, and Images uploaded as WEBP files. This helps reduce the file size and load fast without losing quality.
• If your images are low-quality or blurry, look at websites with stock images like Unsplash or Pexels. If you have the budget, I recommend you create your own original photos with a professional photographer or hire someone to create quality AI images that are unique to your business. (Check out the image below that I created with AI)
• For text, stick to 1 or 2 fonts. Follow a type scale for headings, titles, and body text. Titles should be a consistent size to help break down information.
• The headline and subheadline should be clear. What do you do? Who do you help? and How you help? What are the potential results?
• Stick to your branding colors or use 3–4 colors max. Be consistent throughout pages with colors, text and layouts. Or if you want to keep things simple, use black and white with the third color of your choice.

Keep It Simple

Some of the most professional-looking sites are simple in terms of structure, typography and layout. It’s enough to impress and convert, the two big factors for your business website.

If you need a second pair of eyes or someone to audit your current website for free. Feel free to comment down below with your link and I will respond.