The "About" Page Small Business Owners Always Skip (and Shouldn't)

When was the last time you actually looked at your own About page? Not built it, looked at it, the way a stranger considering hiring you would. If your honest answer is “I wrote three sentences two years ago and never touched it again,” you’re in very good company. The About page is the one almost every small business owner treats as an afterthought, and it’s also one of the pages that quietly does the most work convincing someone to trust you.

Why This Page Gets Ignored

It makes sense that this page falls to the bottom of the priority list. Your services page tells people what you do. Your contact page gets them in touch. The About page feels optional by comparison, like a nice-to-have rather than something that actually moves the needle. But think about your own behavior for a second. When you’re deciding between two similar businesses, don’t you sometimes click through to see who’s actually behind the one you’re leaning toward? That instinct is common, and it means your About page is getting more attention than you’d expect.

People aren’t just hiring a service. They’re deciding whether they trust the person behind it, and your About page is where that decision often gets made.

What People Are Actually Looking For

Nobody’s reading your About page hoping for a corporate mission statement. They want to know a few human things: who’s actually going to show up and do the work, how long you’ve been doing this, and whether you seem like a straightforward, trustworthy person to deal with. A few honest sentences about how you got started, what you care about doing well, and who’s on your team will do more than any polished paragraph full of business jargon.

This doesn’t need to be long. Three or four genuine paragraphs beat a page of vague corporate language every time. If you started your business because you got tired of seeing sloppy work in your industry, say that. If it’s a family business going back two generations, say that. Specific and true always beats generic and safe.

The Trust Gap This Page Closes

Here’s something worth sitting with: people are often letting you into their home, handling something valuable to them, or trusting you with money on the promise that you’ll do right by them. An About page that feels human and specific closes some of that trust gap before you’ve even spoken to them. It’s a strange kind of leverage, a page that costs you almost nothing to write, doing real work toward earning someone’s business before the phone even rings.

A Simple Structure That Works

Start with why you do what you do, in plain language. Follow with a bit of your background or how long you’ve been at it. Add a sentence or two about what matters to you in the work, showing up on time, being upfront about pricing, whatever’s actually true for you. Close with an invitation to reach out. That’s the whole formula, and it takes most people fifteen minutes once they stop overthinking it.

Why It’s Worth Doing Now, Not Someday

A lot of business owners treat the About page like a “someday” project, something to polish once the rest of the site is perfect. But this page is often cheap to fix and disproportionately valuable, which makes it a strange one to keep postponing. It’s part of why getting a real, custom website matters more than people initially assume, since a generic template rarely has room for your actual story to come through. When a full custom build only takes about 50 minutes and runs $50 a month, there’s really no excuse to keep shipping a website that skips the one page where your story could actually do some selling for you.

Don’t Overthink the Photo

If you can, use a real photo of yourself or your team, not a stock image of someone else’s smiling face. It doesn’t need to be professionally shot. It needs to be you, because that’s the whole point of this page in the first place.

A Small Test Worth Running

Read your About page out loud to yourself once you’ve written it. If it sounds like something you’d actually say to a neighbor over a fence, you’ve got it right. If it sounds like a press release, trim it back until it sounds like you again. That one simple test catches most of the stiffness that makes About pages forgettable in the first place, and it takes less time than rewriting the whole thing from scratch.

If you have a hard time writing about yourself, which plenty of people do, try writing it as if you were describing a coworker you respect. It tends to loosen up the stiffness that creeps in when we describe ourselves and makes the honest, human version come out a lot more naturally.

A Mistake That’s Easy to Make Once You’ve Decided to Try

Once business owners commit to actually writing this page, a lot of them swing too far the other way and turn it into a full life story. Where you grew up, every job you had before this one, a paragraph about your hobbies. None of that is bad information, exactly, but it buries the two or three sentences that actually matter under a pile of detail nobody asked for. An About page isn’t an autobiography. It’s a quick, honest answer to “who am I trusting here,” and it should stop the moment that question’s been answered.

A useful check: if a sentence doesn’t help someone decide whether to trust you with their money or their home, it’s probably a sentence you can cut. Keep the parts that build confidence. Save the rest for conversation once you’ve actually got the customer.

Give your About page fifteen honest minutes. It’ll outperform expectations.