Therese Testimonial Screenshot

Believe it or not, there’s some debate on this. I saw someone on Twitter wondering if she should put testimonials on her site, and someone else told her absolutely not, that it was stooping to a lower level to include testimonials. That her work should speak for itself.

On one hand, if all of your business is through referrals and word of mouth, then I guess you wouldn’t need testimonials on your site. If people are telling their friends and family about you, and then those people are contacting you, then you have real-life testimonials. And those are golden, of course. We love our real life testimonials.

If you ask 99% of web designers how their clients find them, they’ll tell you it’s word-of-mouth or referrals.

If you ask us how people find us, I’ll answer “Google.” We get a lot of inquiries from people who are just searching for web design in Google. Those people have not been referred to us, they haven’t heard our great word of mouth stories. They haven’t seen work we’ve done for their friends and family. These people are coming to us blind.

For that reason, I felt like it was pretty important that we include testimonials on site, because I want the people to land here to feel like they can trust us. I want them to see that we’ve worked with a lot of people, and those people love us.

When we redesigned our site, I asked some of our clients if we could not only use their testimonial and link to their site, which is how we’ve always done it, but also include their photo as well. My feeling was that if you can see the face of the person giving the testimonial, that it adds a lot of weight to the value of that testimonial. Check out our testimonials page to see the smiling faces of our clients.

Just days after launching our new site with our revamped testimonials page, Chris Lema posted a blog post about testimonials. His post was about video testimonials and how to do them right. And if you watched our new video (on our homepage) then you saw that we did a couple of those too.

Video testimonials are great because when people really talk about you and your services, without a script, then that feeling really comes through in a way that doesn’t in written text. Our videographer told us the most successful videos he does for his clients are testimonial videos.

So if you ask me, I say yes, a website should include testimonials. But they need to be real. Don’t fake them, don’t get them from your mom, and include photos and videos if you can.

Therese Testimonial Screenshot

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Amy Masson, Web Developer
Owner/Developer

Amy Masson

Amy is the co-owner, developer, and website strategist for Sumy Designs. She's been making websites with WordPress since 2006 and is passionate about making sure websites are as functional as they are beautiful.

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