How to improve website credibility – Criteria and guidelines

Do you own a website, and you are not getting the sort of conversion you had anticipated from the onset? Or you probably think your website designers have done everything perfectly, and yet site visitors are not converting to leads?


Not too many people bother about website credibility these days. Much worse is the fact that some do not even know what it means. Do you know little or nothing about website credibility? You have come to the right place, as this website credibility article will not only be intimating you with how you can improve website credibility, but it will be exposing you to a lot of things you never deemed important since you started doing business online.

The audio version of the article

What Makes a Website Credible?

what is website credibility schema

Source: What Makes a Website Credible?
Prepared for Luke Wroblewski Persuasive Technology Lab
Stanford University

Credibility is a term that reflects the absolute trustworthiness and expertise of your website to site visitors. That is how the website communicates to visitors that visitors can trust business and the business is competent enough to deliver its promises.  

Credibility is a key factor in our company’s success because we help our offshore clients, and we need to prove that outsourcing can be a safe solution for them.

What Makes a Website Trustworthy?

Why Is Website Credibility Relevant?

The answer to the above question is that website credibility has everything virtually to do with whether visitors will become leads eventually or not. With credibility, site visitors are affected in the following way:

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Looking at the above reasons, it is almost impossible to get a site visitor to do something on your webpage if you have zero knowledge about website credibility boosters. It is one factor that largely determines user behavior.

UtilityImportanceRelevanceBelievability
PopularityPedigree
Completeness
Level of detail
VarietyClarity
Understandability
Appearance
AffectAccessibilityConcisenessLocatability
Representative quality
ConsistencyCompatibilityReliability
Trustworthiness
UniquenessTimelinessObjectivity
ExpertiseBenevolence

List of credibility factors included in the Modality, Agency, Interactivity, Navigability (MAIN) model.

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How You Can Improve Website Credibility

Having gotten a good dose of what website credibility is and how it can affect your business, the next step would be to study the different factors that can be considered when trying to tell anyone that comes to your site that you know what you are doing. Here are a couple of criteria for evaluating a website’s credibility and for improving conversion rates:

  1. ACCURACY: The accuracy of whatever you are putting out on your website should be certain. You only need one wrong information to send your site visitors scampering out of your website. So double-check every piece of information to make sure you are publishing the right thing.
  2. AESTHETICS: what does it take to navigate your site? Or do you have vital information contained in a network of nested forms? Visitors enjoy coming to sites that are very easy to navigate. With just one or two clicks, they should access whatever information they need to know. So the right aesthetics means that your site should contain smooth navigation, highly interactive (confirmation messages, search capabilities, and efficient customer service), attractive, consistent page designs, etc.

    Approximately 46.1% of visitors who hit any website are encouraged to surf a little more when the site has an appealing design

    For your information, approximately 46.1% of visitors who hit any website are encouraged to surf a little more when the site has an appealing design, according to a survey that the University of Malaysia carried out.

  3. PROFESSIONALISM, how professional your site is, is another factor that determines the conversion rate. Visitors do not just click on buttons that require them to commit to a transaction when they are not impressed with what they are seeing.
    To boost your site’ professionalism, you should consider the following:

    • Do you have any certifications from a verifiable third party?
    • Does your website lack adverts? Are there broken links or typographical errors?
    • What is your download speed like?
    • Do you have support for multiple languages?
    • How seriously do you treat the privacy and security of your visitors?
  4. CURRENT: how often your page is updated equally helps to encourage your visitors. People do not love to go to sites that are not regularly updated. So the act of implementing date stamps on your page cannot be overemphasized.
  5. QUALITY: content quality is key to your success in this field of business. The high-quality of the content you are putting out is as important as the content itself. The way your information is structured is equally important. Your content should flow as naturally as possible.

An impeccable source carried out a study to help ascertain how site users feel when they come across adverts on webpages. It was discovered that 45% of users only spend about 30 seconds on that website when they find adverts that are not related to their search.

45% of users only spend about 30 seconds on that website when they find adverts that are not related to what they are searching for.

During creating project specifications for your website, you should mention that you need solutions to boost your website’s credibility.

Content Author Credibility Boosters

You do not just pick up any content you see on the internet and have it posted on your website. If you are going to be impacting your site’s credibility, you need to work with an author that is highly reputable in the field you are working on. To identify the author of whatever material you choose to work with.
You can find information on a particular author by looking at the first page’s copyright section or the about us page. Below are some other things you can verify about the author:

57% of persons who visit websites tend to believe what they see on a website only when the author demonstrates a sense of authority in their content,

In a recent study by some experts who specialize in user behavior, insight was stated that 57% of persons who visit websites tend to believe what they see on a website only when the author demonstrates a sense of authority in their content. In comparison, another 68% were solely interested in the authenticity of whatever the author was putting out.

The Effect of Aesthetics on Web Credibility

In the online business, it is the more you look, the more you see! People are attracted by what they see. If it is good, they will stick around. If it is bad, they will be gone in a minute. For credibility to be enhanced, balance and harmony ought to be optimally explored. The more a web page is harmonized concerning all the elements on it, the more visitors trust what you tell them from a first glance.

Based on Fogg’s Maxim, “To increase a website’s credibility, identify the elements that your audience deem most favorably, and do what you can to make sure those elements are at the top of your priority list.”

The above statement only tells us that over 80% of the reasons why users behave the way they do on our websites can be traced to what they see and like.

The credibility of the website is one thing that can make or mar your business opportunities. In the online market, you have to grab every single opportunity that comes your way, and that can be made possible by enhancing your webpages’ reputation as often as you can. Professional and standard-looking web pages define today’s online business, and that is what we do for our clients; we help them build trust and credibility before their audience.