When it comes to your business, building a connection between you and your customers is crucial. With that in mind, it’s as important that you get users to trust your website as well.

Whether your website is out of date, lacking description or even overloaded with descriptions, you’ll want to get these issues fixed. Even if you’re writing an informal blog, it’s important that you keep your pages clean, quick-moving, and easy-to-read.

In order to stay ahead of the game, you’ll want to know how to tell if your website visitors have confidence in you and your brand. Here you’ll find 7 tell-tale signs that your website users don’t trust you. Take note and make any necessary changes to ensure that your business or service is successful online.

7 tell-tale signs that your website users don’t trust you

1. About Us Page MIA – One of the top reasons users won’t trust a website is because there is no “About Us” page for reference. This page is second on the list of the most visited on any business website. Users need to know who you are and what your brand is all about before making any type of purchases or signing up for newsletters or service. Without a page dedicated to details regarding you or your company, you’re sending a message that you’re either shady or unprofessional.
2. Typos – When your website is littered with misspellings and typos, your brand looks inadequate. Grammatical errors are not only annoying, they’re a surefire way to kill your audience, and quickly. In order to give the best impression, you’ll want to skim through every inch of your site to ensure all i’s are dotted and all t’s are crossed.
3. Contact Us Page is Blank Whether it’s blank or difficult to navigate, when your website’s “Contact Us” page doesn’t give enough information, your brand is deemed unreliable. If a potential customer or user can’t reach out to you, they’ll just mosey on down to the next competing website.
4. Hard to Navigate – If your website is full of ads and popups, or you don’t provide clear-cut tabs or links to corresponding pages, your site is hard to navigate. When users can’t move around your site with ease, they’ll quickly move on to the x-out button. Make sure you offer users easy-to-locate tabs that they can click–directing them to other important pages.
5. Optimized for Google, Not Users – Although you need to optimize your website for search engines, you must optimize it for users. If your website looks like a keyword prison, then your efforts are all in vain. Yes, you got the traffic to your site, but will they stay? Probably not! You have to balance between keyword and user-friendly when adding content to your site. Ensure that your visitors are interested in your content and not distracted by fluff and keyword stuffing.
6. No Address – Another way to ensure your users question your website authenticity is to leave out any physical address. They want to know how to reach your company or services, and when you don’t offer a real address, they become skeptical. Make sure to include this information on the “Contact Us” page to put your user’s minds at ease.
7. Slow-to-Load – Probably the fastest way to rid your website of users is to publish a site that’s slow to load. Whether it’s your server, hosting company, or your website is overcrowded, you need to get this nipped in the bud. There are a number of reputable website speed test sites on the internet, use them.

BONUS: SSL

Without SSL, your website users are at risk. Make sure that your site implements secure (SSL) certificates. SSL is set up to ensure that all sensitive information that’s across the Internet is safely encrypted. This step is crucial to make certain only the intended recipient understand the language/message. Any information sent through way of the Internet is transferred between computers in order to arrive to its target server. Every PC in-between the original sender and the receiving server will have view of credit card numbers, passwords, usernames and additional information. When you have your site encrypted with an SSL certificate, you’re safeguarding the personal details of yourself, brand, and users.

Keep your website as user-friendly as possible. By implementing these changes, you’ll enjoy a surge in return traffic and improved SEO search rankings. Give your users the confidence they need to keep coming back.