How to Create a Trustworthy Website

The internet has grown exponentially in the last couple of decades. It makes perfect sense that you, I and the old lady across the street now have a digital footprint of some kind—the whole world.

Businesses and other entities need to be online too. If you’re not online with an agreeable and usable website, then you might be selling yourself short of success. Typically, many new businesses starting up will establish themselves with a well-designed website.

It’s the face of the company online and I’ve noticed a great way of getting your company to scale. However, while aesthetics are important to web design, security is crucial. The global average cost of a data breach in 2024 is USD 4.88M – that’s a 10% increase over last year and the highest in total. 

In this guide, I’ll provide you with the tools and guidance you need to perfect the balance between aesthetics and security when creating your business website. Whatever your intentions as a business, aligning these two elements creates both trust and loyalty in your brand.

What core elements should a web design possess?

With modern web design, the development and design of the website need to be carefully planned and thought out. There are certainly some core elements that I’d advise you to not overlook. These include:

• Readable typography that’s consistent throughout
• Mobile optimization
• White space
• Accessibility
• Easy navigability 
• Browser compatibility

As well as the above, the site should be optimized for search engines in order to provide the best chance of ranking higher on the results pages (SEO). This includes improving page loading speeds and linking internally to keep bounce rates low.

Balancing aesthetics and security for web design

While you might want to deliver the very best-looking web design on the internet, you don’t want to compromise the site’s security. 

From my own research, consent policies need to be visible and clear enough for users to accept or reject them. Otherwise, you compromise your site and the company’s data compliance (and I’m sorry to say, but it will incur a hefty fine). If it’s not designed well, then this could throw your business into some hot waters.

With that being said, let’s take a look at some of the ways you’re able to balance aesthetics and security when designing your website(s).

Assessing and mitigating risks

One of the biggest threats for companies nowadays is cyber attacks so it’s important to cement your security efforts in every element of your web design. Most importantly, when collecting confidential information through payment processing.

Check this out: 80% of consumers will abandon a business if their information is compromised in a security breach. It’s essential you’re doing everything in your power to improve the security of your site when designing it.

You don’t want to miss out on those sales. So, when designing a website, particularly for the purpose of eCommerce, fraud and risk management software is money well spent. A system that is easily integrated into your site’s backend operations helps to control risks with ease. 

Having this solution in place will help provide peace of mind that preventative measures are being taken to protect your site and business.

Protecting data and privacy compliance

With data and privacy compliance becoming more restrictive, it’s imperative you follow the rules. You should ensure your web design doesn’t compromise any compliance with the laws in place.

From GDPR to more country/state-specific privacy compliance, it’s useful to understand what you’ll need to adhere to. No matter where your customers are based, there will likely be some form of data compliance in place that you need to comply with.

I personally advise that compliance audit software is helpful to use while designing and developing your site. Software like this is helpful in attaining the correct consent in order to obtain, manage, and document information from users.

When you’re a privacy-compliant business, you’ll be securing the trust and loyalty of users who willingly hand their data over to you.

A reliable hosting platform

As part of the design process, finding a reliable hosting platform is one of the first choices you’ll make when it comes to creating a website from scratch. 

The hosting platform you choose will also determine how secure it is. Therefore, you should make comparisons for all of the hosting platforms available, whether that be Shopify, WordPress, or any of the custom-built solutions out there. 

Each platform provides its own advantages but you should be looking out for certain features that will keep your site secure while users are browsing. These include:

• SSL certificates
• Firewall protection
• Malware scanning
• Regular updates and backups

Some hosting platforms are going to be more effective when it comes to the performance of the site, which of course, is also important to keeping users on your site.

Making it UX and accessible-friendly

There are around 1.1 billion websites on the internet as of writing this article. That number is only going to increase as younger generations find themselves on the internet, along with new businesses and organizations popping up every single day.

For the designers responsible for curating the design of your site, every element and functionality should be UX and accessible-friendly. There’s still a significant portion of websites on the internet that aren’t optimized for access needs and therefore are missing a big portion of the buyer market as a result.

UX is a big influence on business performance so the better experience users have on your site, the more likely they are to return to the site at a later date.

Designers should look at making every feature and element of the site as accommodating and inclusive as possible. Fostering that loyalty and trust is something that should be consistent at every point within the design and web development process.

Design principles are something to be aware of when it comes to designing a site, as well as the best practices to ensure your site is both aesthetically pleasing but also secure. Whether that’s adhering to regulations and compliance as mentioned already, to delivering a consistent brand image across your web pages, it all goes towards creating a credible site.

Optimized and trustworthy content

Your website should feature plenty of content and the more consistent you are with content, the more opportunities you have of ranking high on Google’s search engine.

Improving your website performance is one way of improving rankings but your content also plays a crucial part. I have found that optimizing your existing content and remaining consistent with future content helps draw users in and contributes to the ultimate goal of getting them down the sales funnel.

In order for users to feel as though the site is safe, the content needs to be authentic and trustworthy. You could use plugins to help with optimizing content, as well as following best practices to ensure your content is hitting the mark every time. 

This optimization process is never-ending. It’s an ongoing process that will continue to improve and elevate your site’s presence online. With that being said, include keyword research, and attractive headings, as well as optimizing media content.

Encrypt and authenticate

Encryption and authentication are two mechanisms that are helpful in protecting both your data as a business and your users. As part of the web design process, you should obtain an HTTPS certification from your platform or hosting service. This is a great way of encrypting your website 

In order to authenticate the users coming onto your site, you should make use of biometrics, tokens, passwords, and other methods that are readily available. As mentioned, management software is helpful to have for the purpose of risk and fraud activity.

Gather user feedback and track analytics

Finally, and perhaps the most important step in creating a trustworthy website is to gather user feedback and track its activity.

Your users are an integral part of the website’s performance, so gathering their feedback on how well the site performs is key. It’s information that helps improve the experience and satisfaction, even when you feel you’ve done everything to better the site.

The methods by which you gather this information could be reading reviews on third-party sites to collecting feedback through surveys or in the form of testimonials. Being able to identify pain points and preferences is useful for both web design and security.

Analytics helps track activity on the site and the behavior of your users as well. Use platforms like Google Analytics or Hotjar to track and analyze key metrics for your site.

Combine aesthetics and security for trustworthy websites

To exist and thrive in a dominant online world, your business should create a website that engages your users and helps encourage action from these individuals, whether that be to buy a product or service.

Aesthetics and security are able to co-exist within your web design so make use of the tips above to create a trustworthy website for your business.