Why your About page matters more than your homepage

I'm going to make a claim that most marketing people would push back on.

The most important page on your small business website isn't your homepage. It's your About page. And the reason most micro-businesses are losing customers they don't realise they had is because they've spent a lot of time on the first one and almost no time on the second.

Bear with me, because the reasoning matters as much as the claim.

Different pages, different jobs

Your homepage and your About page are doing two completely different jobs, and most owners haven't noticed.

The homepage's job is to answer the question "is this relevant to me?" Someone arrives, they've come from a search or an AI summary or a recommendation, and they're scanning to find out whether they're in the right place. What do you do, where do you do it, who do you do it for. If the homepage answers those quickly and clearly, the visitor stays. If not, they're gone.

The About page's job is completely different. By the time someone clicks "About," they've already decided you're relevant. They're past the first filter. The question they're now asking is the one that actually decides whether you get hired.

That question is "do I want to work with these people?"

Those are not the same question. And the second one is the one that closes business.

The bit nobody mentions

Here's something else worth knowing. The About page is consistently one of the most-visited pages on a small business website. For many micro-businesses, it's second only to the homepage in traffic. Sometimes it beats it.

That's not random. People go there on purpose, at a specific moment in their decision, with a specific question in mind. They're trying to work out who you are before they get in touch.

And what they find, on most micro-business websites, is some version of "We are a passionate team committed to delivering excellence" followed by a stock photo of people who don't work there. The most important moment of the customer's decision, and the page is doing the marketing equivalent of mumbling.

That's the gap this article is about. Not the gap between good websites and bad ones. The gap between a perfectly decent homepage and an About page that's still doing absolutely nothing useful.

Why it matters more for micro-businesses

This is especially true if your business is small.

When someone hires a multinational, they're hiring a brand. The brand does most of the heavy lifting on trust and reputation. Whether they like the actual person they end up dealing with matters far less than the company they represent.

When someone hires a micro-business, they're not really hiring a company. They're hiring you. Or you and a small handful of people. The work, the relationship, the experience, the problem-solving when something goes wrong, all of that is about to be shaped by who you actually are. Customers know this instinctively, which is why they go looking for the human behind the website.

If your About page doesn't show them a human, or shows them a generic, sanitised, brochure-friendly version of one, they make a decision based on what they didn't find. Often that decision is to keep looking.

What a great About page actually does

Here's the practical bit. A great About page does five things.

It speaks in the first person. Most About pages are written in third person. "Jane has over 20 years of experience in [industry]..." and it dies on the page. Third person was something agencies started doing in the 1990s to make small businesses sound bigger, and it's been slowly killing About pages ever since. First person is human. First person sounds like you. First person is what works.

It tells the reader who you actually are. Not your CV. Not your "passions." A few honest sentences about who you are, why you do this work, and what's important to you. Specific, real, slightly imperfect. The version of yourself you'd describe to someone over a coffee, not the version you'd put in a corporate bio.

It's specific about who you help and how. "We help small businesses succeed" tells the reader nothing. "I work with bathroom installers, electricians, and plumbers across the West Midlands who want their websites to actually bring in calls" tells the reader everything. Specifics build trust because they prove you understand the customer better than the generic competition does.

It quietly disqualifies the wrong customers. This sounds counter-intuitive but it's the move that makes the right customers lean in. A line like "if you're looking for the cheapest option, I'm probably not your guy, and that's fine" tells the right customer they've found their person and tells the wrong one to keep looking. Both outcomes save you time.

It includes a real photo of you. Not stock. Not from your wedding ten years ago. A current, decent-quality photo of you, looking like you actually look, doing work that you actually do. The single fastest way to make a small business website feel real is a real face. The single fastest way to undermine trust is a stock photo of someone who clearly isn't you.

What to cut

While you're at it, here's what to remove from your About page.

The mission statement. Nobody's reading it and you don't believe it either.

The vague paragraph about being "passionate" and "committed to excellence." Every business says this. None of them mean it the same way. The phrase has lost all meaning.

The history paragraph that starts in 2014 and ends with "today." Customers don't care about your founding story unless it's genuinely interesting. If yours is, tell it properly. If it's "started in a spare bedroom, grew, here we are," don't bother.

The team headshots that are obviously a different team. If your team has changed, update the page. If you don't have a team, don't pretend to. "We" when you mean "I" is one of the most transparent moves on the small business internet.

Generic stock images of computers, handshakes, coffee cups, lightbulbs. They're all signals that nobody's bothered to think about this page properly.

A worked example

Here's a before and after. It's based on the kind of About page I see almost every week on micro-business websites.

Before:

About Us

Welcome to ABC Plumbing. We are a family-run business with over 20 years of experience providing high-quality plumbing services to homes and businesses across the West Midlands.

Our team of fully qualified, professional plumbers is committed to delivering excellence on every job. We pride ourselves on our reliability, our quality of workmanship, and our customer service.

No job is too big or too small. Get in touch today for a free quote.

That's invisible. Every plumber has that page. Reading it tells you literally nothing that you wouldn't have assumed already.

After:

Hi, I'm Dave.

I've been a qualified plumber for 22 years. I started out doing emergency callouts at 3am for British Gas in my mid-twenties, and these days I run a small two-person team in Worcester doing mostly bathroom installations and the occasional boiler swap.

I'm not going to be the cheapest plumber you find. I price properly because I do the work properly, and the work properly takes time. What I can promise is that I'll turn up when I said I would, I'll explain what I'm doing in plain English, and if something goes wrong I'll come back and fix it without an argument.

I work mostly with homeowners across Worcester, Malvern, and Droitwich. If you're looking for someone to fit a bathroom that won't leak, that won't take six weeks longer than promised, and that won't disappear the moment they cash the cheque, I'm probably your guy. If you're looking for the cheapest quote in town, I'm not, and that's OK. There are plenty of other people who'll happily race to the bottom with you.

Want to talk it through? Call me on [number] or drop me an email. I usually pick up.

That second version takes about 60 seconds to read and the reader knows exactly who Dave is, what he does, who he's for, and whether they want to ring him. Notice what's not in it. No mission statement. No "passionate about quality." No team. No years of certifications. Just a real human being explaining, in his actual voice, who he is and how he works.

The reader either thinks "yes, this is my guy," or thinks "no, not for me." Both outcomes are good. Both save everyone time. And the reader who thinks yes is now significantly more likely to ring than they were before.

That's what an About page is for.

How to actually do this

If you're now looking at your own About page with a slight wince, good. That's the right reaction.

Here's the simplest way to fix it.

Open a new document. Forget what's currently on the page. Pretend a customer's just asked you, in a coffee shop, "tell me a bit about you and what you do." Write down what you'd actually say to them. Speak it out loud if it helps.

Then read it back. Cut anything that sounds like a mission statement. Cut any sentence that contains the word "passionate" or "committed." Cut any phrase that could appear, word-for-word, on a competitor's website.

What's left is your About page. Tighten it, fix the spelling, add a recent photo, and put it live.

It will feel weirdly informal compared to what's there now. It will probably feel slightly too personal. That's the right feeling. That's how you know it's working. The version that feels safe and professional and corporate is the version that's been losing you customers without you knowing.

The point of the About page isn't to impress your competitors or to satisfy your inner perfectionist. It's to give a real human being, who's just decided you're relevant, the second piece of information they need to decide whether to hire you.

Make it count. Most micro-business owners aren't, which means doing it properly is a quick advantage almost nobody else is taking.