Your About page is not a company history. It is a page about letting a stranger into your house.

The About page usually gets written last, by whoever has the least to do that week, and it usually opens with a year.

It is also one of the most visited pages on a small business website, which makes it an odd thing to treat as filler.

Who is actually reading it

Not somebody browsing. By the time a person clicks About, they have already decided they might want what you do. They are not gathering information about your industry; they are gathering nerve.

For a trade especially, the question underneath is physical. Somebody is going to arrive at their home, be in the kitchen for three hours, possibly while a child is asleep upstairs. The page is being read the way you would read a profile before letting a stranger through the door, because that is exactly what is being decided.

It is frequently read by somebody who did not find you at all. One person searches and shortlists, then sends the link to the person who has to agree, and that second reader arrives with no context and more scepticism.

What answers that

Faces. Actual photographs of the people who turn up, not a stock image of a smiling man in a hard hat who has never been to Texas. If your customer will meet three technicians, they should be able to recognise them.

How long you have done this, stated plainly with a number rather than as "years of experience". Where you live, if you are local, because a business run from the next suburb is a different proposition from a franchise operated from another state.

What happens on the day. Who arrives, whether they put covers on their boots, how long a typical job takes, and what happens if something goes wrong a fortnight later. This is the paragraph that does more reassuring than every adjective on the page combined, and almost nobody writes it, presumably because it feels too mundane to publish. Mundane is the point. The customer is not trying to be impressed; they are trying to picture Thursday morning without anything going badly, and a business that can describe that in five plain sentences has already distinguished itself from the four competitors describing their commitment to excellence.

And the credentials that matter for your trade, which for a licensed business means the licence itself. In Texas, some trades are required to carry that number in advertising anyway, and the About page is the natural home for it rather than a footer nobody reads.

What to cut

The founding narrative that begins in 1998 and proceeds chronologically.

Your customer is deciding about Thursday.

The mission statement, which is a sentence written to make a business feel serious and which no customer has ever read to the end. The stock photograph of a handshake. The paragraph explaining that you are passionate about quality, which every competitor also claims and which therefore carries no information at all.

None of that is wrong exactly. It just occupies the space where the useful material would go.

It is also where "who" gets answered

There is a search argument as well, and it is the same argument. Google's own guidance on helpful content is organised around who created it, how it was produced and why it exists, and the About page is where the first of those is supposed to be answerable.

A site whose About page names nobody, shows nobody and commits to nothing has left that question open on purpose or by neglect, and a reader cannot tell which. The same standard applies to what you publish, which is why our own posts carry a byline rather than appearing from nowhere.

The test

Read your About page as though you are a person who has just been quoted for work in your own home, by a company you had not heard of yesterday.

Then ask whether you would let them in. If the page has not helped you answer that, it is not doing the job it is actually being asked to do, whatever it says about 1998.

If you want a straight read on whether your About page reassures anybody, book a strategy call and we will go through it. It is usually the cheapest page on the site to fix and the one nobody has looked at since launch.