If you need MSP website design tips, you’ve come to the right place. This article is all about creating an MSP website design that builds trust with your audience.
To start off, building trust with your website visitors is one of the most crucial steps to gain new customers. This article is going to cover the critical areas of your website design you need to focus on to build real trust with your visitors.
Here are our actionable MSP website design tips you can use to turn your visitors into paying customers.
1. Explain Who You Are
You must be transparent about who you are and who you serve when designing an effective website. This is so your visitors know within a couple of seconds whether they’ve arrived in the right place.
Start by describing the services you offer, who you serve, and most importantly, how you solve your customers’ problems. Be clear about your products and services and explain why your potential client needs them.
Make sure to use photos of real people, such as members of your team, to help website visitors get to know the people behind your business.
Avoid excessive use of stock images for this reason, too, because it can feel impersonal and generic.
Then there’s what others are saying about your business.
Has your business won industry awards? Highlight these on your website for further proof of your expertise!
Featuring real testimonials from your previous clients, comments from social media, and case studies are all forms of ‘social proof’.
In other words, potential clients don’t just have to take your word for it because others are saying it for you. It’s one of the most powerful marketing tools you can use!
2. Contact Information
Providing clear avenues for potential and existing customers to contact you is a must—especially as an MSP business.
Customers need to feel secure that they can speak to a real person and find the answers they need at any time, at every stage of the buying process, effortlessly.
Plus, companies without readily available contact information feel untrustworthy in visitors’ eyes.
You must display contact information where it’s obvious and do it several times. If visitors need to hunt down how to get in touch with support or sales, they won’t stick around for long.
If you have a live chat function, make the widget always visible (but not distracting or where it obscures other information).
Have links and buttons to your knowledge base and support center.
Include FAQs pages, and put email addresses and phone numbers at strategic points on your website where they’re always visible (like your headers and footers, for example).
3. Cross-Browser/Device Compatibility
Cross-browser and cross-device compatibility are when your website functions correctly, no matter what browser or device a visitor is using.
This is a crucial element in creating an effective MSP website as visitors could use thousands of combinations of browsers and browser versions, smartphones, tablets, and computers.
You need to ensure no matter how they’re viewing your website, their experience is positive and it works the way they expect.
Websites that cut off text, don’t load images, fail to display menus and widgets are offputting and will have visitors trying your competitors instead.
It sounds daunting, but it doesn’t have to be if you have a plan in place.
Firstly, your website design team needs to understand which browsers and devices are most commonly used by your target audience. You can do this by checking your website analytics and reporting features.
Next, you can physically test on these browsers and devices, or use browser emulators and cloud-based platforms that can help you test on a variety of devices and make changes where necessary.
Finally, make sure to test regularly, as browser versions and devices change at lightning speed.
4. Website Page Speed
All of your SEO efforts could be in vain if you have a slow website, as Google penalizes websites with a long page load time.
And critically, a slow website is infuriating for customers.
Visitors’ attention spans are shortening and they won’t stick around long enough to find out if your business is a good fit for them. Nearly half of website visitors expect a website to take 2 seconds or less to load. Where do they go after they abandon your slow website? Your competitors.
Here’s how to ensure your site is lightning-quick.
- Optimize images so they’re smaller
- Switch to a quicker DNS
- Upgrade your hosting provider if your traffic has increased
- Enable compression, so that your CSS and HTML files are smaller
- Remove unnecessary plugins on your website
Many sites provide a report on the page loading speed of your website, like PageSpeed Insights by Google. Don’t forget, you’ll also need to test for both desktop and mobile devices.
5. Brand Consistency
Keeping all design, communication, and messaging ‘on-brand’ is an absolute necessity to build a credible MSP website.
Everywhere customers find you— whether that’s on your website, social media, or marketing channels— your brand’s ‘personality’ should be cohesive.
Customers trust companies that feel recognizable and dependable.
Creating a consistent brand requires planning. Here’s how to approach creating brand consistency in your MSP website design.
- Build buyer personas. These are fictional ‘characters’ you’ll create based on your customer demographics, to make marketing more effective. use this in your branding so it’s more effective for the people you want to attract.
- Build your brand’s aesthetic. This includes a color palette, types of images or illustrations, typography, and your company logo.
- Develop your brand’s ‘voice’. Considering your industry and buyer personas, it’s important to come up with a certain way your brand ‘speaks’. This is reflected in the kinds of words you use and the emotions you evoke. Do you want to sound formal and authoritative? Playful and casual?
- Create branding guidelines. Put all of the research and development together to create guidelines that everyone in your company uses, whether they are on the website design or customer support team. This confirms that everyone in your company operates using the same ‘brand’, keeping the experience the same on and off-website.
In summary
To summarize, the top tips for creating an effective MSP website design include:
- Explaining who you are and what you offer;
- Displaying support articles, FAQs, and contact information in obvious places so they’re easy to find;
- Making your website cross-browser and cross-device compatible;
- Reducing the page load time;
- Building a consistent brand.
These website design tips cover the major areas of building a credible website that converts.
If you are interested in improving your social presence and growing your business we advise you to check how to design an effective MSP Marketing Strategy and what key performance indicators you need to monitor and track.
