How to write an about page that actually wins work
What belongs on an about page, why it is one of the most visited pages on most sites, and how to write it so it builds trust rather than listing your history.
An about page should do four things: say what you do and who for in plain terms, establish why you can be trusted with it, show the people behind the work, and give the reader a next step. It is not an autobiography and it is not a company timeline. The most common mistake is writing it about yourself, when its actual job is to answer a question the visitor is already holding: can I trust these people with this.
The about page is consistently one of the most visited pages on a business website, and one of the least considered. People land there specifically to decide whether you are real and whether they want to work with you, which makes it a sales page wearing a modest name.
Who reads it and what they want
Almost nobody arrives on an about page out of curiosity about your history. They arrive at a specific moment: they are broadly interested, and now they are checking you out before they commit to contacting you.
That reader has three questions, in this order. Are these people legitimate and still trading. Do they understand my situation. Would I want to deal with them. Everything worth putting on the page serves one of those three, and everything that serves none of them is decoration.
Open with them, not with you
The most common opening line on an about page is the year the company was founded. It is the least useful sentence available, because it answers a question nobody asked.
Open instead with what you do and who you do it for, then move quickly to why that matters to the reader. Your founding year, your history, and your growth are context, not the headline. Give them their place further down where they support trust rather than delay it.
Establish credibility with specifics
Trust is built from concrete detail, not adjectives. Passionate, dedicated, innovative and results-driven are the four words most likely to appear on an about page and least likely to convince anyone, because every competitor uses them too.
Replace them with things that could only be true of you. How long you have done this, the kind of clients you work with, the number of projects, a named result, a qualification, an accreditation, an award with the year attached. Anything a competitor could copy word for word into their own page is not doing you any good.
Show the people
For a services business especially, people want to see who they will be dealing with. Real photographs of real people beat stock imagery every time, and a small team presented honestly is more persuasive than an anonymous one implying scale.
Do not hide being small. Buyers who want a large agency will go to one, and buyers who want direct access to the person doing the work are actively looking for what you are. Pretending to be bigger attracts the wrong enquiries and disappoints them later.
Say what it is like to work with you
This is the part most about pages skip and the part that most often converts. What is your approach, how do you communicate, what do you expect from a client, what do they get from you.
A reader deciding whether to enquire is trying to imagine the experience. Describing it briefly and honestly removes the friction that keeps people hovering on the page instead of clicking through to contact.
Keep the history short and make it earn its place
A founding story is worth including when it explains something useful: why you specialise in what you do, why you work the way you work, what you learned somewhere else that you brought here. Told that way it is evidence.
A chronological account of every office move and staff milestone is not. If a line does not make the reader more confident, it belongs in a company brochure rather than on the page.
End with a next step
An about page that convinces someone and then leaves them at a dead end has wasted the work. Close with the obvious action: get in touch, see the work, book a call. The reader has just finished deciding they like you. That is the cheapest conversion you will ever get, so do not make them go looking for the way forward.
A quick test
Read your about page and ask two things. Could a competitor put their name on this and publish it unchanged. And does it tell the reader anything that helps them decide, or only things that are true about you.
If it survives both questions, it is doing its job. Most about pages fail the first one in the opening paragraph.
See also: What should be on your homepage, What content you need for a website, What makes a website feel cheap.