Running a home business gives you a lot of leeway relative to running a conventional business with dedicated office space. You don’t need to dress professionally outside of video conferences and in-person meetings. You don’t need to have your working environment geared towards anything other than practicality — if your home looks messy, it won’t really matter.

In short, what ultimately matters is that you are professional. Whether you look professional is insignificant. That doesn’t apply to your business website. Anything you use to represent your business to your potential customers needs a level of polish that can rival what you’d expect to see from top brands because the internet is intensely competitive.

So how can you build website trust and make it look professional without spending more than you can afford to put towards it? Here are some key tips:

Tips to Boost Website Trust Easily

1. Provide Strong Performance

The largest part of showing professionalism through your website is ensuring that it provides solid user-experience, and that means meeting (or ideally exceeding) the current performance standards. It needs to load quickly, regardless of the type of device used to access it or the nature of the data connection, and operate at a consistent speed as a user browses it.

Think about everything that usually goes into reaching the point of conversation. A prospective customer might reach the homepage, head to some product pages, open up their cart, start the checkout process, and go through all the required steps. If the website grinds to a halt during any of those steps, the entire process can be ruined.

Central to this, then, is choosing the right eCommerce host. The host you use will determine how fast and reliable your site is, in addition to conferring numerous other benefits, so it isn’t a decision to be made lightly. Do your research and choose very carefully.

2. Offer Compelling Social Proof

Amazon has become one of the biggest search engines in the world because many eCommerce shoppers will use its internal search before they bother with Google. Why? Because it’s a platform they trust. However you feel about Amazon as a business in general, you can’t deny that it’s exceptionally good at what it does — and that consumer trust is essential.

Even though it adds to their costs, many of today’s smaller eCommerce sellers (particularly dropshippers) opt to provide their products through the Amazon marketplace, whether additionally or exclusively. This allows them to take advantage of that established trust. How are you supposed to earn a similar level of trust for your store?

Well, your biggest weapon is social proof. It’s social proof that makes Amazon products easy to trust, and you can deploy it just as effectively. All you need to do is start collecting detailed reviews and position them prominently on your site (assuming they’re positive). Make a habit of sending out post-purchase surveys — and if you get negative reviews, learn from them.

3. Refine Your Text and Images

It’s shockingly common for sellers to invest heavily in their online stores without ever bothering to work on their on-site content. They’ll have product descriptions full of typos and features that don’t make any sense, and sit them underneath product photos that are blurry, low-resolution, and extremely unflattering. This obviously has a massive negative impact.

If you want to boost your website trust and ensure people take your website seriously, you need to show that you care about the quality of your content and have the skills required to make it decent (or at least bring in professionals to make it decent for you). You might not enjoy going through multiple iterations of your site copy, steadily polishing your product descriptions until they’re highly convincing, but look at it as a worthy long-term investment.

In this time of reliable online hosts and convenient site-setup tools and templates, there’s really no excuse not to have a business website that looks professional and makes a strong case for why visitors should trust it. Following these three tips should give you a reasonable start, but you need to keep at it: online standards never stop changing.

Rodney Laws

Rodney Laws is an eCommerce expert with over a decade of experience in building online businesses. Check out his reviews on EcommercePlatforms.io and you’ll find practical tips that you can use to build the best online store for your business. Connect with him on Twitter @EcomPlatformsio