When someone lands on your website, how do they know they can trust you? Conversely, when you land on a website, how do you know that you can trust it?

We all know the big retailers and brands. We know that if we purchase from Amazon, or Nike, or Disney, we're going to get what we paid for. There may be issues relating to shipping or the quality of the product, but that's not an issue with trusting the website; it's just the nature of the product.

What about a small business running a website on Squarespace? How do you know whether or not to trust the site? What do you look for?

In general, there are four categories of "things to look for" on a website that indicate it can or cannot be trusted. These are:

• Design and structure elements that indicate trust.

• User interaction elements that indicate trust.

• Trust seals and badges that provide trust from a verified third party.

• Statements that proclaim the site is trustworthy.

They can be subtle, or they can be overt. They can be minor elements that only appear on landing or checkout pages or elements at the forefront of the homepage. And, in some cases, they can even backfire. If you say "don't worry, you can trust me" a few too many times; people start to wonder why you're so aggressive about saying it.  

These site elements are called social proof. They're ways you inform your audience, via your site design and content, that your brand is trustworthy. Since the internet is packed full of people operating sites, and many of those people are doing it to scam others out of money, it's a minefield. It's no wonder that central authorities like Amazon, eBay, and Etsy have taken over so much commerce; they provide protections, verification, and trust. Of course, the tide is turning, and public opinion on sites like Amazon is shifting away and back to small sellers, but that's just the ebb and flow of commerce.

So, here's our situation. 

You're a small business owner, an individual freelancer, or another seller online. You have a Squarespace website (excellent!), and you want it to be more trustworthy, so users feel more confident in shopping with you. How can you do it?

The answer is to implement social proof. The only question is how. Let's go through each of the four categories and cover what you can do to implement them.

Category 1: Design and Structure

Have you ever visited a site, and you've just felt that it was super shady? Sure you have. Who hasn't? 

You probably just left, though, rather than looked into why you felt like that. What it comes down to is a combination of a shady offer and the design of the site. It's like spam email; you know an email is a spam message when it's full of typos, filter-avoiding symbol replacements, and too-good-to-be-true claims.

You can boost how trustworthy your site looks and feels with structural and design elements for a website.

A graphical logo. This one is important on Squarespace. The default Squarespace site lets you use a textual element for your "logo," but many sites appear less trustworthy when they don't have a graphical image as a logo. It doesn't necessarily matter how unique the logo is – a simple circled letter or name in a box (like mine) is enough – but it's better than a plaintext brand name up in the corner.

Why? Well, it's one of many signs you'll see on this list of "effort put into the site." Most scam sites online are created with the barest minimum of effort and expense.

The more energy, time, and money it takes to launch a scam site, the worse the returns will be for the scammer, right? So by putting effort into things, you show that you're concerned about something other than profit. A clean and well-built site is one of the most important trust signals.

A robust and modern design 

This tip follows from the previous statement. While it's relatively easy to get an excellent, sleek design on Squarespace, having a customized website with care put into it is so much better. For example, using plugins to expand functionality, using a customized theme instead of one of the defaults, and generally customizing the design of your site to be unique are all core signs of trust.

A custom domain name. Using a .squarespace.com URL, or a .blogger.com or .typepad.com or whatever other free services you find is a sign that minimal effort or time is being put into the site. 

It's okay for personal blogs, but for a business? If you're not even willing to pay the $15 a year it costs to register a domain name for your brand, how can your customers expect you to provide quality products or services? 

Luckily, Squarespace makes it easy to link up a domain name.

SSL implementation

Many different forces are interacting to make SSL a necessity these days. The prevalence of hackers sniffing for data, the increasing concerns about privacy and tracking, the prominence of the green lock in browser windows; all combine to make people more aware of secure websites than ever. Using SSL is just enough of a bar for spammers (and still prevents third parties from stealing your data even if a scammer is on the other end) that it's essential to implement.

Integration with trustworthy services. 

This one is a bit more nebulous, and not everyone can do it, but let's say you have an app for sale. If you have buttons that link to the Google Play store and the Apple App store, that's a pretty good sign that you're at least somewhat trustworthy since those services have heavy review processes and are trusted installers for devices. If you link to a raw .apk file, it's much less trustworthy.

Availability of contact information

Another source of trust, and one that users may consciously look for rather than subconsciously note, is how easy it is to contact you if they have a question or an issue. They might look for an About Us page, a privacy policy page, or a contact page. 

They might check to see if you have a physical address or just an email address, if you have a phone number, or if you have identifiable information they can use to reach you. You can also implement something like a live chat plugin, which your customers can use to contact you directly. These are resources that your customers will look for as soon as they land on your website.

Category 2: User Interaction

The second category is user interaction signs. These are visible signs that people other than just you are using the site successfully. 

Studies have shown that 92% of people will trust a recommendation from a peer, and 70% of people trust recommendations from people they don't even know. That's a pretty powerful incentive to add in user-generated social proof!

There are a few ways you can do this.

Testimonials

Asking for and receiving positive recommendations from your customers in a format you can use (with their name and attribution) is a great way to boost a site's credibility, especially if you have customers who are themselves noteworthy in some way. If I got a shoutout from the CEO of Squarespace, that'd be excellent social proof for me.

Reviews

Typically on product pages rather than dedicated testimonial pages or homepages, reviews are real customers' honest thoughts and experiences. It can sometimes be a pain to solicit these, but they're valuable when you have them.

Company features

You may have seen brands with lists of logos, typically news agencies and industry blogs, where they've been mentioned, linked to, or featured. Big, authoritative sites usually don't recommend scam sites, so this is another form of social proof.

Activity

Plugins like this one create a little pop-up in the corner showing other customers are actively buying what you have for sale. They cheat a little bit (showing within a given period, so it's not precisely real-time), but they're still a useful little tool. As a bonus, this can trigger FOMO (the fear of missing out) and get people on the fence to convert before a time-limited offer or quantity-limited product is gone.

Other signs of user interaction can be beneficial, though in a more roundabout way. For example, you're probably running a blog for your site (and if you're not, you should be), and you likely have a comments section. 

If your blog posts are getting comments, even if it's only a few of them on each post, that's a sign that users like and trust you. Just make sure the comments are genuine and are not spam!

Category 3: Trust Badges and Seals

Trust badges and trust seals are tiny graphics you can display on your site showing that you've been verified as trustworthy by a third-party service. A restaurant lists its health department inspection certificate, for example.

On a website, you'll see trust seals from sites like:

• BBB: Better Business Bureau accredited business.

• Google Verified Customer Reviews

• Amazon Best Seller

• VeriSign

• McAfee Secure

• PayPal Verified

• TRUSTe Certified

There are dozens if not hundreds of sites that provide these badges. Unfortunately, it's pretty easy to go overboard here in two ways.

The first is by using a third-party service that is not trustworthy. After all, if your only trust seal comes from a company you can pay $5 to get a trust seal from with no review or further inspection – or from a company that no one has ever heard of – it's not a verification. It would be like if I went around and started "inspecting" restaurants and giving them seals of approval. I'm not even a food blogger; my inspection holds no weight. Why would anyone trust me?

The other is by using too many trust seals. Less is more here. You want, at most, four or five badges in strategically placed spots. A PayPal verification and an Amazon Payments verification both on your checkout page are acceptable. A few trust seals on landing pages around an opt-in form are also good. Are you plastering 20+ seals all over your product pages? 

That's just going to make anyone skeptical.

There's also the idea that many of these trust seals are embedded images from those third-party sites. 

If you don't have an account and verify with the site, they'll take down your image, either by removing your ability to link the picture or filing a DMCA. Of course, that's only worthwhile if the user knows that they should check the image source.

Unfortunately, trust seals, in general, aren't all that valuable. You can use a couple of them, but make sure the issuing authority is trustworthy and doesn't go overboard with it.

Category 4: Statements and Claims

The final form of social proof is the claims you make. Your homepage might say, "Trusted by over 100,000 customers worldwide!" Your product page might have "10,000 verified items sold." 

These kinds of claims tell the user what scale of operation they're dealing with.

There are, unfortunately, two problems with this.

The first is that the scale matters. If you're a small business and have fewer than 100 customers, proudly proclaiming "90+ customers served!" isn't going to inspire much trust. This is why many social sharing button plugins would hire the number of shares a post has until it reaches a certain threshold.

The second problem is that, well, there's no verification of this. I could say I have over a million customers, and how would you be able to prove otherwise? Your claims need to be true, accurate, and realistic for your brand's prevalence and exposure. It helps to have third-party verification in the form of mentions and reviews from a wide range of other sites, but that's a whole other issue.

Building Trust

Trust is hard-won and easily lost, so doing everything you can to build up the signs of trust is a good idea, and sooner rather than later. The order of categories above is, roughly, the best way to go about it. 

Start with structural, design, and user-based signs of trust, and grow from there. Trust seals can be good when you're starting, but they outlive their usefulness outside of the checkout process, and even then, a good SSL certificate is just as comforting for many people.