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Financial institutions might not be among the early adopters of changing technologies, but they quickly follow suit. As customers demand better services and digital experiences, you should consider moving your financial service business into the digital space, with website creation as a starting point. Creating a lending website is no simple feat. Unlike other types of websites, your platform should provide 24/7 support to different audiences and be flexible to adapt to various technological changes, business strategies, and evolving customer expectations. If you need a simple website that can ease loan agreement between friends or want something more professional, prioritize the following features.
1. Enterprise Level Security and Data Privacy
While security should be a priority feature for all websites, banking, and other financial service websites should provide enterprise-grade CMS security and assured data privacy. This is because websites in the financial industry, including sites of credit unions and banks, are among the top targets for cybercriminals and other malicious individuals. Financial institutions are the most regulated because of the information they collect from customers. Customers seeking these services share a lot of sensitive information, such as social security numbers, addresses, and bank account numbers (including the numbers of bank accounts for teens). Storing these details is why financial institutions should be on high alert to avoid constant cybersecurity threats.
2. Intuitive Loan Website Navigation
Most customers primarily visit your loan website to access their accounts. However, you should make every other website information easy to find. While site navigation strategies have undergone several trends, the need for customers to find what they are looking for easily hasn’t changed. You should organize your website so that customers can easily find what they are looking for.
3. Easy Loan Website Search
Well-designed websites should make it easy for customers to find what they want. However, since modern users are accustomed to using the search feature on various sites, such as Amazon and Google, they might want to use the search feature on your website. Your loan website should feature a visible search option. The search option should surface popular searches and answers to common questions on inquiry. You can achieve this by customizing the search option or using third-party solutions.
4. Responsive and Mobile-friendly Design
Like other website types, your loan website should responsively adapt to traffic from computers, phones, tablets, and other devices. A website that doesn’t embrace the best practices of responsive website design is a clear sign that you don’t prioritize user experience. Unlike before, having an unresponsive website will make your loan website seem outdated and may put off potential clients. Therefore, ensure that your website can be accessed from desktops and laptops and is mobile-friendly. The following tips can make your website mobile-friendly.
What Makes Loan Website Mobile-Friendly?
- Choose a mobile-friendly theme and template – If your website is built on a CMS, like WordPress, make sure that you choose a mobile-friendly theme and template or switch to a responsive one.
- Strip back content – Having chosen a mobile-friendly theme, you should then distill your content. Avoid uploading large amounts of text and shorten opt-in forms. Ensure that the forms only ask for absolutely essential details.
- Make CSS and images light – Making your website light also makes it mobile-friendly. However, this doesn’t refer to the virtual weight. Compressing your images and hosting videos on third parties are a few ways of lightening your website.
- Eliminate pop-ups – If used appropriately, pop-ups work well on desktop website versions. However, they might not work well for mobile websites and should be avoided. Mobile versions have a smaller screen, and tailoring pop-ups to trigger at specific moments is difficult.
- Change button placement and size – Most websites use buttons as a link to other forms or sections. However, a good button can damage your website if positioned or sized wrongly. Your website becomes irrelevant if customers can’t click some buttons.
- Use large and readable fonts – while the recommended font size for desktop is x14, make sure you test out the mobile version. Chances are, this font might be quite small, and you should consider increasing it.
- Space out links – Just as how difficult it is to use closely placed or incorrectly sized buttons, the same applies to your links. Ensure that hyperlinks aren’t too close and link out to mobile-optimized websites.
- Test regularly – Conducting frequent tests is the only way to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly. The best way to test is run URLs on Google’s Mobile-friendly tool and try different device sizes from your desktop.
5. ADA Compliance
Everybody should easily access your website, including people with disabilities, such as epilepsy, dyslexia, blindness, and other conditions. For this, the latest WCAG 2.1 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) can help web owners understand best practices for maximizing user experience to achieve ADA conformance. Any websites designed or developed against WCAG guidelines or existing websites should be retrofitted. That aside, there should be a plan by web managers to ensure that lending websites remain compliant and conduct regular ADA scans to mitigate negative user experience.
6. Self-service Features
Your loan website should also allow visitors to take control of their needs. Incorporating useful tools such as a bridging loan calculator to enhance user autonomy and decision-making can significantly empower users by providing them with immediate financial insights. Your website should save clients’ time, especially those with simple requests. This can be achieved by integrating chat features, robust site search options, and quick links that answer customer inquiries immediately. Websites that prioritize customer interactions appear reliable and trustworthy. These attributes come in handy when customers are looking for better offers, such as taking more loans or opening new accounts.
7. Effective Landing Page
Before spending money on marketing campaigns, you should ensure that your website has an effective landing page. A good landing page should eliminate unnecessary elements while focusing on your specific offers to improve conversion. Well-designed landing pages should support and complement the efforts of your marketing campaigns.
8. Online Account Opening and Loan Request
If your loan website doesn’t allow customers to open their accounts and apply for loans online, you should rethink your strategy. Offering these services makes your platform competitive, respects customers’ time, and is pandemic-friendly. Just like banks provide mobile and online banking services, allowing your customers to open their accounts and apply for loans from the comfort of their homes meets their expectations.
9. Live Chat Feature
Apart from online self-services, your website should have a live chat option. While online forms allow customers to contact you, live chats are an effective way for customers who need an immediate response. The following statistics show how important live chats are;
- 41% of clients would prefer live chat to contact support over other communication channels
- 63% of customers who visit a website and interact with support using live chat are more likely to return to the website.
- 79% of customers prefer using live chat because it provides immediate response.
Most people have a lot of questions before taking a loan. As such, you should include this feature to answer their questions and concerns immediately.
What Loan Website Should Have – Endnote
Other crucial features for your loan website include cross-browser compatibility, seamless third-party integration, email sign-up, customer testimonials and reviews page, a blog section, and a clear call to action on all web pages. Your blog section should focus on improving your customers’ financial literacy with helpful resources about loans and other issues affecting the industry at large.