First impressions are crucial to any relationship. Getting off on the wrong foot with someone can be disastrous, and asking too much of them right off the bat might scare them away.

It’s the same with your website, which is often the first impression a potential customer gets of your business.

As a designer, it can be tempting to try to convince visitors to give up information (or money) right away, but first you have to persuade them to stay on your site for more than a few seconds. If you approach design from a visitor’s perspective, with a focus on gaining trust, it will be easier to turn someone into a client and progress into a lasting relationship.

Here are five methods to increase customer loyalty to your website:

Make it simple to find your contact information.

People who visit your website will always have special questions or want to know about specific details, no matter how thoroughly you explain your product or service. For this reason, it’s critical that you start making your contact information easily accessible and provide a way to contact you.

In the majority of the instances, the contact information is located at the top or bottom of the page. If your pages are especially long, or if you only have one extremely long page, it may be advantageous to make this contact information available in other ways. It is possible, for example, to view the data in a window that appears when the user scrolls down. Consider this if your page is built with an infinite scroll!

Aside from keeping it simple for visitors and potential customers to contact you, responding quickly is an important step toward building trust. If you assure that you’ll respond over a certain amount of time, whether it’s two hours or two days, communicating this information lets customers understand what to expect and increases the accountability of your business.

Include live chat

In terms of responding quickly, live chat is another way to show visitors that you’re genuine and accessible. Internet users are accustomed to obtaining information at any time, so it is not shocking that they expect prompt, if not immediate responses. After all, the internet is on and ready for business. 

If you use live chat on your website, it’s among the most efficient opportunities to communicate with users and give them the impression that real, honest people are working around the clock which is especially important in service-related industries. As with contact details, live chat should be easily accessible. You should ideally use a service like SnapEngage or Zopim that allows users to navigate from page to page of your site while chatting without being too intrusive or negatively impacting the customer experience.

Take pride in your sources.

Assume you’re standing at a bus stop, explaining your back pain to a friend. If a total stranger jumped in and asked, “May I assist you?” I’m a doctor, you can trust me!” You’d most likely respond with suspicion. What if your friend said, “I saw a doctor who was able to help me with my back pain”? When a trustworthy or well-known third party verifies a stranger’s skills, it’s far easier to resolve suspicion and demonstrate expertise.

You may illustrate the dependability of your product or service by including main customer references on your website. Customers’ logos, particularly those with a high profile and a positive image, can easily convey your trustworthiness and encourage prospective consumers. After all, if well-known businesses are already using your service or product, that’s a good sign.

Even so, be cautious when using business logos. They should be positioned in a prominent but not in the foreground location. On your website, your organization should have first billing. The emphasis should be on your own goods, services, and logo with references supporting your message and offering. Don’t let the reference customer’s logo colors and design overwhelm the website’s design or your own company’s corporate identity.

The same rule applies if you wish to show logos from acceptable news organizations, blogs, or review pages. Using them wisely and in moderation. Instead of confusing potential clients, you want to strengthen the company’s reliability.

Provide relevant information

Visitors would definitely ask what service or product you delivered and how well it performed when they see a list of reference customers’ logos. 

These natural questions can be answered in two ways: To explain the collaboration and the benefits that resulted, include some customer quotes or testimonials. You may also include case studies that detail how your organization collaborated with your client. 

Take a look at TestDel’s case study with Tout, a mobile video site, for example. Case studies and testimonials allow potential clients to assess goods or services in context, allowing them to make an educated decision about whether or not to contact you. (see the first point)

Remove dead links from your website

As basic and obvious as this guidance may appear, there are still many links on homepages that don’t work or lead anywhere. You may use tools like Google Webmaster or Screaming Frog’s broken link checker to check these.

You can also make sure that your website’s full functionality is accessible on a variety of devices and browsers. For this, a different categories-based service like TestDel helps you to get a huge proportion of testers to review your site on a variety of real devices. The benefit of making actual people review your website is that even though a connection isn’t actually broken, the content of the page may have modified or the link may no longer make sense in the context of your website.

In general, it’s significant to mention that all of these small steps pave the way to gaining potential customers’ confidence. You will ensure that any glitches, issues, or mistakes on your website do not negatively impact confidence by using an impartial group of testers. It’s one of the most effective ways to raise consumer trust and avoid losing future customers.