3 Reasons Customers Mistrust Your Website And How to Avoid Them

Trust is everything. It is the glue that builds the lasting relationship between you and your customers, and it depends on a variety of factors like customer service, product quality, and user experience.

A large part of your customer’s experience is from their interaction with your website. So, if your website is not meeting their expectations, you can lose them as customers.

Three major reasons customers mistrust your website are because of your website’s slow load times, outages, and page errors. We will go over the dangers of each and how you can remedy them to maintain trust and loyalty to you.

Why Customers Mistrust Your Website

Lack of trust comes from the inability to deliver a quick, consistent, and reliable website experience. Let’s go into the details of what prevents you from delivering these.

1. Slow Load Times

According to a Digital.com survey, 1 out of 2 visitors will abandon a website if it takes longer than 6 seconds to load, and half of online shoppers expect a page to load in 3 seconds or less. In short, load times on your pages are extremely important. If your pages are sluggish to come up, it will lead to your clients being frustrated and confused.

To avoid this, you have to ensure your pages are loading fast, which you can check by monitoring your website, which we’ll go into more detail later.

2. Website Outages

In November 2022, the FIFA app crashed, infuriating users who lost access to their tickets for the 2022 World Cup opening. Without the app working, they could not get into the stadium to watch the game. The fiasco forced fans to wait in long lines outside the building to get physical copies of their ticket, with some having to wait up to four hours without water.

As a customer, if this happened to you for any website you used, would you trust it? Would you give it another chance or wait for it to fix itself? Most likely not. The amount of frustration and mistrust that builds from something like this is enough for anyone to never want to deal with the platform again.

These types of outages showcase that you are not capable of handling your client’s needs and will lead to damage to your reputation.

3. Page Errors

You are shopping online, and when it finally comes time to buy, you press checkout, and your page suddenly goes blank with a message of a 404 error, or worse, the page loads and loads, and you realize it is frozen. Then what? If you’re like 89% of consumers, you will most likely leave the page and shop with a competitor.

Page errors reflect poorly on your professionalism. They give customers a belief that maybe you do not know what you are doing or that you haven’t tested out all aspects of your site. They need to know they can trust you with their money, and malfunctions like this show that you are unreliable.

How to Gain Customer Trust

Now that you know the three reasons your customers mistrust your site, how can you prevent them from happening? The simple answer? Website monitoring.

Monitoring will give you a clear view of what issues your site has, whether that be on errors, anomalies, performances, or user behavior. When you have access to this type of information, you can quickly fix issues and communicate with clients to gain trust.

There are three specific things with monitoring that you can utilize to improve customer experience and reduce errors and outages. Let’s dive into them below.

1. Performance Monitoring

To prevent slow load times, you need to know which specific pages are underperforming. Real User Monitoring (RUM) collects website visitor data and provides you with a dashboard that gives an overview of your website performance, speed, and experience.

RUM aggregates page views so you can look at your page load time trends. It measures page load time, ajax load time, errors, and bounce rate on pages so you can track which are sluggish, so you know what to fix. You can also pinpoint weak spots in users’ online experience in one place and share them across your business.

If you want to quickly test your current website speed, you can try Uptime.com’s website speed test. Although it’s not as detailed on a page-by-page level as RUM, it is a good place to start.

2. Error Alerts

Oftentimes, there will be errors thrown way before an outage occurs, warning you that something is amiss. So the best way to reduce website downtime is to address errors as quickly as possible before they snowball. Monitoring alerts will help you do this by automatically notifying you of issues.

Alerts are tied to checks that examine the health of various aspects of your website. For example, a transaction check mimics the steps a user takes to buy a product on your website (clicking the product image, adding it to the cart, checking out, etc.). From this check, you can set up an alert if any of the steps throw an error.

There are also API checks that use POST, GET, PUT, PATCH & DELETE requests that ensure the API works as intended.

A good alert system will send you alert details along with the notification so you can quickly troubleshoot the problem. Uptime.com alerts give you details on location, date, error logs, which service was affected, current downtime status, and the number of locations down. It will send you the alert through text, phone, or email, or it can integrate with messaging apps like Slack or other incident response tools like PagerDuty to help contact the correct people.

3. Status Pages

In the real world, it is impossible to prevent all errors. So when an issue does occur, communicating with your customers will bring transparency and build customer trust.

This is precisely what status pages will help you do.

These web pages show a list of services and their uptime/downtime statuses, along with other stats like performance. To make sure it will be a page your customers will want to interact with, it is advisable to make it aesthetically pleasing.

According to WebFX, 75% of a website’s credibility comes from design which is why Uptime.com offers branded status pages that are simple, clean, and easy-to-digest status pages with your branding (logo, colors, etc.).

You can also set up an SLA performance report status page to increase accountability and include downtime, incident summaries, and performance metrics on it to keep the public informed of your metrics.

Next Steps

According to PWC, 32% of customers were willing to leave brands they loved after one bad experience, so to prevent this, you’ll want to avoid slow page loads, outages, and errors as much as possible. The best way to keep your customer’s trust in your website and business is to maintain control of your website, which can be done through a comprehensive website monitoring tool like Uptime.com.

Check out Uptime.com’s free trial to see if it’s a good fit for your needs, or contact us for a live demo of any of our monitoring products.