Firstly your website will need to look modern and load fast.

It’s incredibly easy to lose a potential customer just by having a website that looks tired or loads really slowly.

We know another competitors website is only a click away, so undoubtedly there will be very quick comparisons made.

Even if your products, services / quality of work are better than your competitor, if your website doesn’t reflect that, how can a potential customer know any better.

Consistency builds trust.

As a website owner you don’t know how a potential client is going to access your site.

They could be on their phone, on a table or on their laptop.

They will undoubetdly have a preferred web browser that to use to look at websites, e.g. Chrome, Firefox, Safari.

You don’t want a potential customer browsing your website on a phone where it looks perfect and then later that day looking at it on their laptop and being presented with a very inconsistent or poorly optimised version of the same site.

Therefore, the best plan is to cater for all scenarios, by using modern web development practices.

Never make your customer think about how to use your website.

People browse websites all day long and have expectations about how things work.

Anything that veers too far from this path can put a potential client off.

What you may think is an incredibly nice feature could be incredibly confusing for your visitors.

Remember at all times what your website is trying to do and who your target audience is.

Once a good initial impression has been made, we will want to provide a potential customer with some of the following:

• Examples of previous work that has been carried out. This could be a simple gallery but individual case studies will work better.
• Photos of you / staff and some bios.
• Some social proof in the form of tesimonials or even ratings from third party websites integrated onto the site, such as Checkatrade.
• Multiple ways to get in touch, e.g. phone number, email address, forms.
• A blog that lets you flex your expertise within your industry.

Check that all of your contact information is correct.

Nobodies going to go out of their way to track down the correct information if it’s old information on your website.

If you’re going to have a blog on your website then ensure that it’s up to date.

If the last entry was from over a year ago then people may think you’re no longer in business. At the very least it could imply laziness. Either way it’s not building trust.

Likewise for social media. If you have accounts and are promoting them through your website then make sure you’re posting regularly.

If you really don’t have the time for any of this then consider outsourcing it or removing it from your website altogether.

The following are all small details that add up in terms of building trust. You’ll want:

• An SSL certificate. We explain what that is here.
• A privacy policy so people know how they’re data is being used.
• Implicit consent on data capture forms so that people know how you will use their personal details.
• Email addresses that use your web address instead of say hotmail, e.g. contact@berkshireplumber.com is much more professional than berkshireplumber@hotmail.com
• A website that is kept up to date and is secure. There’s nothing like seeing a strange warning message on a website to really lose trust with a potential client.