Besides being a fun acronym to say, FUDs are an important thing to consider regarding your website. “FUD” stands for fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Essentially, they’re the reasons visitors to your site might leave without purchasing your good or service in the first place.

All else held constant, FUDs lead to a poor user experience. They can often prevent otherwise interested visitors from converting, whether that’s through making a purchase, submitting a lead, etc.

This is because these fears, uncertainties, and doubts undermine a visitor’s trust — can they trust the business and the website? Can they trust it enough to convert? When there’s substantial doubt or uncertainty, the answer can easily be “No.”

In order to gain visitors’ trust, you must first address these potential FUDs.

Obviously fears, uncertainties, or doubts all can lead to visitors abandoning your site prematurely. How they do so varies depending on the category.

Fear relate to security or privacy. A visitor might wonder if the checkout and personal information contained therein are secure, for example.

Uncertainty, meanwhile, concern the usability of the site. In the basic sense, is the site user friendly? Digging into what makes one “user friendly” — is it navigable, and the process intuitive?

Doubt is where the actual service or product come into play, along with the website’s role in facilitating that purchase. For example, does the site have what they want to begin with, and is the price accurate (especially if there are different variations of size, model, etc. of this product)? Are descriptions accurate and informative? Is the company itself reputable?

What can cause FUDs, and how can you prevent them?

It’s worth noting that often, a cause of, say, an uncertainty will also bleed into doubt or fear. In general, though there are some things that lean more towards one or the other.

Fears are often caused by a checkout appearing unsecure, illegitimate, or “sketchy.” Uncertainties can be caused by an overabundance of popups and obnoxious display ads, overly long forms, or if your site is taking too long to load. Similarly, error messages can cause users to abandon your site.

As far as doubts, one thing that can frequently cause them is when a product page has vague or minimal information. The same can be said for a landing page with no specificity or minimal helpful information.

Example of PDF Reader Download – No signs of security, outdated design, no reviews

So how do you address these issues on your website?

Obviously, you can’t cover every FUD here, but there are some general good practices.

For fears, make sure your website is on https, not http, and implement an SSL certificate to make sure your site’s identity is authenticated. The latter is especially a good idea for ecommerce sites.

Example of Secure Connection and Certificate on Homedepot.com

We also strongly recommend making your contact information easily visible, especially for customer service if you have separate contact information for that purpose. Similarly, make sure your company policies like return, exchange, or product guarantees or warranties are clearly visible.

As far as minimizing uncertainties, make sure for starters that your site looks professional, has fast loading time, and is mobile friendly. The steps of checking out (or a lead submission, whatever is your conversion) should be laid out clearly so the user understands the order of required steps, and it should also be clear what will happen after they complete their purchase or hit submit. And of course, for ecommerce sites, you should always provide the option to checkout as a guest; requiring users to create an account to make a purchase will result in many of them abandoning their cart at checkout.

Example of Sign In or Checkout as Guest on Barnes & Noble website

Lastly is eliminating doubts. Much of this comes down to making product or landing pages look informative, high quality, and convincing. Product photos, for example, should be high quality and appealing. Alongside them on a product page should be relevant technical details and specifications. If you can include product testimonials, awards, endorsements, and reviews, that’s even better!

Example of Product Details on Target.com

Of course, heeding these details can’t ensure every visitor to your site is completely confident in the quality of your products or the security and ease-of-use of your site. But these are good first details to cover so that you have a good foundation in place. From there, it’s important to frequently question what fears, uncertainties, or doubts could be had by visitors to your site and proactively address them.