Whether you’re DIY-ing your first ever website or a seasoned pro, it’s really important to include testimonials in your website design process.
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Social proof such as testimonials or sections with logos of publications where you’ve been featured are a huge part of high converting websites.
Testimonials are proof that you’re not just saying that you’re an expert at what you do, but someone else has paid you to do it and had great results. Potential clients want to know that people just like them have gotten the results that they want by working with you.
Featured in sections give you authority because they prove that you’ve been invited by someone else to share your expertise with their audience.
Collecting testimonials
The first thing you need before you think about adding testimonials into your website design is the testimonials themselves.
This might seem obvious to you but I’ve had loads of clients who’ve never thought to collect testimonials or reviews from their own clients. My advice to you would be to make getting testimonials, and feedback in general, a part of your standard process when offboarding your clients.
One week after I officially handover a website to my clients they get an email asking for general feedback and a testimonial if they want to provide one.
I do occasionally have to follow up, and there are clients who don’t ever get back to me to provide feedback. It’s not that they didn’t have a positive experience, in fact some of these clients often return to work with me sometimes they’re busy and that’s OK too. Don’t take it personally. But start collecting testimonials today.
Once you have some, make sure you keep them together somewhere handy because they’re great for not just website content but social media and email content too.
Where to display testimonials on your website
The biggest mistake I see with testimonials on websites, is them being relegated to a single page. If your testimonials are only on a single dedicated page, you’re doing yourself and your business a huge disservice. When you put at least a couple of testimonials on each page of your website visitors will be able to see them as they’re browsing.
If you only have a couple of testimonials at the moment don’t worry. You can still make it work by pulling out quotes from them and using them throughout your website. As you get more and more you can replace the quotes with new testimonials.
Ideally testimonials should be placed close to a call to action. This is so that it’s front of mind when you ask a visitor to take some kind of action. Whether it’s to buy now, book a free call or do something else.
Why display testimonials throughout your website?
- Testimonials back up the benefits and features of the services you offer
You know that your service is the bee’s knees BUT potential clients might not know that. If someone is on the fence about whether or not to hire you a strategically placed testimonial or two could really help them make a decision either way. - We’re easily distracted
If a visitor is on a service or sales page on your website you don’t want them to have to navigate away to check out your awesome feedback only to be distracted and forget how they got there. - We’re busy people
These days we have a lot going on in our lives. Whether it’s work, business, children, running a home, it’s safe to say we lead very busy lifestyles.
We don’t want to have to go out of our way to search for information to make a decision. If we can’t find what we’re looking for pretty quickly when landing on a website we’ll likely move on to a competitor who makes life easier for us.
How to display testimonials on your website
There’s no hard and fast rule of how testimonials should look on a website. The aesthetics will depend on the overall design and branding of your website.
Below are some basic guidelines – remember that these are just guidelines. If you aren’t able to follow them all it’s still worth adding testimonials in any form to your website design.
- If possible use a picture of the person providing the testimonial or even a business logo, this just adds an extra layer of credibility.
- Ideally you would also use the name of the person/ business who gave the testimonial too if you can.
- Try to stay away from adding testimonials that are paragraphs long. If you do have these kinds of testimonials pick out key sentences and use those. Think about sentences that wax lyrical about you, your service and he results you got.
- For maximum impact place them near a call to action.
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