The About Page for a Small Business Website Is a Trust Test

Most about pages read like a company history nobody asked for. Founded in 2004. Steady growth. Committed to quality. A photograph of a handshake underneath.

The about page for a small business website has one job, and it is not telling your story. It answers the question the visitor is already holding: can I trust this person to turn up.

Everything else on that page is decoration.

What an about page for a small business website is really for

Somebody finds you through a search or a recommendation. They have skimmed your services and they half believe you can do the work. What they still do not know is whether you will answer the phone, arrive on the day you said, and behave properly in their kitchen.

No list of company values settles that. Specifics do.

Take an Easingwold joiner. His page could say he is passionate about craftsmanship, or it could say he has been fitting kitchens and staircases for nineteen years, works within about twenty miles of Easingwold, and that the number on the site rings his own mobile because there is nobody else to pass you to.

The second version is shorter and does considerably more.

What to put on an about page, in the order it matters

A face, first. A real photograph of the person who will actually show up, not a model in a clean hard hat. We have argued before that stock photos quietly cost a local business trust, and the about page is where that damage lands hardest.

Then the area you cover, named. Towns, not “Yorkshire and the surrounding areas”. A homeowner in Thirsk wants to see Thirsk written down.

Then how long you have been at it. Years in the trade are the cheapest credibility you will ever get, and most sites bury them somewhere near the bottom.

Then who answers the phone. If it is you, say so. If it goes to your wife on Tuesdays, say that as well. People find that sort of honesty reassuring in a way no carefully worded paragraph manages.

What to cut

The mission statement. The values grid with the little icons. The founding narrative that opens with “it all started when”. Nobody has ever picked a joiner because of a mission statement.

Cut the wall of praise too. Testimonials do their work beside the decision, not stacked in a corner of the about page, which is the whole point of putting testimonials next to the decision.

What is left is usually three or four short paragraphs and a photograph. It feels thin while you are writing it. It reads as confidence when somebody else is reading it.

The test to run on your own page

Read your about page and ask what a stranger knows now that they did not know sixty seconds ago. If the answer is “that this business exists and likes doing a good job”, the page is doing nothing at all.

If the answer is “a bloke called Mark, nineteen years in, covers my town, picks up his own phone”, then it has done its work.

Honest, not fancy. That is the whole of it.