How to Build User Trust on Your SaaS Website

Are B2B buyers cowards? That is the question research from Forrester hoped to answer earlier this year.

Ultimately, the buyers aren’t cowardly; they are rational and thorough in their decision-making. Forrester reported that “an astonishing 43% of B2B buyers admitted that they make defensive purchase decisions more than 70% of the time,” meaning that less than 30% of B2B buyers are risk-tolerant.

And it makes sense. They are on the hook with their company and colleagues regarding the spending. In many cases, the purchase also has a direct effect on how they do their job day-to-day.

So, this raises the question of how B2B companies, like SaaS tools, can bridge the gap between risk-averse and purchase. The answer is trust.

There is plenty we could go into on the theory and psychology of trust-building, but instead, I’d like to focus on the actionable. Specifically, one great lever SaaS companies can use to build trust with their users is website optimization.

Read on to learn:

• How trust and authority fit into the Heuristics for Digital Experience Optimization™
• Strategies for identifying the trust gap in user research
• Specific tactics to build trust via the UX design and content of your website

What is the Trust & Authority heuristic?

It takes longer for B2B leaders to trust vendors, and on top of that, according to PWC’s Trust Survey, it is harder to regain that trust once lost. So, it’s crucial that SaaS companies establish and maintain trust in all their sales avenues, one of the most important being the website.

So, how do you ensure your website not only looks credible but genuinely inspires trust? The key lies in aligning your website with proven trust-building principles, like The Good’s Trust & Authority heuristic, and implementing targeted strategies to address common user hesitations.

Trust & Authority is one of the six Heuristics for Digital Experience Optimization™, a tool developed at The Good to theme common optimization issues and opportunities with the user at the center of analyses.

The Trust & Authority heuristic focuses on establishing and maintaining perceived trust, authority, and security throughout the digital experience. Issues like bugs, AI-generated images/quotes, or other elements that violate users’ sense of trust can lead to disengagement. Building trust, as we know, enhances users’ confidence in the website and typically leads to a better conversion rate.

To follow this heuristic and build trust with users, you can try tactics like mitigating bugs, featuring social proof, or adding additional educational “how it works” content for complex products.

But, before you begin to solve trust and authority issues, it’s important to identify where in the funnel users are dropping off because of heuristic violations.

Identifying user trust gaps through research

User behavior often reveals where trust is lacking. Here are a few signs you’ve violated user trust that you can look for in user research.

Bugs: When site elements or pages don’t function as intended or when they produce error messages or glitches.

Attentive/Intentional Reading: When a user slowly scrolls over content on mobile or desktop, their mouse hovers over text, typically line-by-line.

Halted Scrolling: When a user pauses on the site to possibly engage with content/reorient themselves, it could indicate that the user perceives a false bottom.

Dig even deeper by speaking to your customer support teams and conducting data analysis. Try to gather both quantitative and qualitative data that helps identify violations of the Trust & Authority heuristic.

Tactics to build user trust on your SaaS website

A visually cohesive and intuitive design contributes significantly to perceived trust. Users judge credibility in milliseconds based on aesthetics alone. Clean layouts, consistent fonts, and strategic use of white space can make your website feel more authoritative. But beyond visual design, what can you do to build trust with users? Here are tactics we’ve seen work time and time again.

Get creative (and more detailed) with your social proof

When marketing and optimization teams hear they need to build trust with users, minds rightfully jump straight to social proof.

But, to effectively signal authority in today’s digital world, you need to get even more creative and even more human. Here are a few ways to do it.

Try adding social media handles to customer reviews like ActiveCampaign

We all know that featuring expert testimonials can increase trust and confidence and increase conversions in the same way positive reviews can build user confidence to make a purchase decision.

But, it’s table stakes to include reviews on your site. Try to take things a step further and make those reviews more human. ActiveCampaign, for example, uses X handles on featured reviews to increase the credibility of quotes from real users.

Or add “customer since” dates like Dynamic Yield

Alternatively, if your reviews don’t come from social media or you’re featuring a case study as social proof, you can try other added authority indicators. In the case of Dynamic Yield, a label with “customer since” dates shows the loyalty of current users along with the results they achieved with the product.

Build social proof into the user journey, like U-screen’s forms

Humans tend to “reference the behaviors of others to guide their own behavior” (NNG, 2014). To leverage this tendency, you can build different types of proof, such as social proof, testimonials, and proof in numbers, into unique areas of the site. One place that can make or break the experience is form design.

U-screen does this well on their registration page with clear proof in numbers to accompany examples of their products’ output.

To achieve similar trust-inducing outcomes, the numbers, testimonials, and social proof you’re using should be the primary, or at least secondary, text on the form screen to catch the user’s attention.

Build trust with logos and badges

Another way that SaaS companies might think to build trust with users is by featuring client logos on their sites. But again, this is table stakes for most.

To build a stronger bridge between the risk-averse client and your product, try taking a supplemental approach to featuring logos and badges.

Borrow credibility from partners like Zapier

To integrate social proof and demonstrate the value of your product, you can borrow credibility from partners.

Zapier clearly includes logos from their integration partners in the hero section of the homepage, immediately building trust with customers who are familiar with or use any of the tools they partner with.

Show your certifications and badges like Dynamic Yield

Similarly, you can feature privacy certifications or data policy badges on your site, similar to what Dynamic Yield does. And if it is close to the CTA, even better!

Offer (and then stick to) a guarantee like Freshbooks

Guarantees can help prime users to make purchasing decisions and incentivize them to purchase. They give users a feeling that the brand is making a commitment to them. Highlighting guarantees in a quickly scannable way can increase a sense of trust, reduce decision paralysis, and highlight the value of a product.

Highlighting guarantees is great for sites with high-value products and/or companies with trust-reducing user-dependent variables. Freshbooks offers a full refund within 30 days of purchasing their product. It is similar to a free trial but framed differently.

Add a how-it-works model like SignNow

Describing “How it Works” for some business models and/or features can give users the context and confidence that they need to understand competitive differentiators like price and quality.

Doing so for complex products will boost user trust, encourage buy-in to the brand, and instill purchasing confidence.

SignNow describes the steps to enable dual-factor authentication for a PDF while showing a summary of how it works to show users how simple it is to protect a document with their tool.

Improving user trust increases registrations and retention

All of these are proven tactics we’ve seen across clients, but let’s remember one key part of optimization. Not everyone’s users are the same.

Adding an industry license badge to your product page is a great way to build trust. But you shouldn’t simply add the badge and pat yourself on the back. Job well done, right? Not quite. Now, you have to actually measure whether it creates the intended trust. Otherwise, you have no idea if your tactic satisfied the issue.

To track and measure this, we suggest planning with a theme-based roadmap.

With a theme-based roadmap, you can plan, communicate, and track the initiatives and associated metrics. You also have a clear path to conduct testing to make sure changes achieve results.

By aligning your website with The Good’s Trust & Authority heuristic, you not only build confidence but also position your SaaS business for sustained growth. Take the first step toward a more trusted digital experience—and watch how it transforms your registrations and retention.

Ready to optimize your website for trust and authority? Let’s talk.