About pages that actually convince

Here is an uncomfortable number from our analytics audits: on most studio, agency and B2B services sites, the About page is the second or third most-visited page, and the single most common final stop before someone either writes to you or disappears forever. Not the services page. Not the portfolio. The About page. It is where a buyer who already likes your work goes to answer a harder question: can I trust these people with my problem, my budget and my reputation?

Most About pages answer that question with a founder's biography, a timeline of office moves, and a paragraph that begins "We're passionate about…". That copy isn't neutral. It actively burns the goodwill the work page built. After twelve years of writing and rebuilding these pages — including our own studio page, which is on its fourth honest draft — I've landed on a structure that treats the About page as what it actually is: the closing argument of your sales process, disguised as a history lesson.

What the visitor is actually asking

Nobody reads an About page to learn about you. They read it to learn about themselves in relation to you. Strip the politeness away and every visitor arrives with three blunt questions:

Are these people good enough? Some of this is answered by the work they've already seen. The About page's job is to confirm it with evidence of continuity — how long you've been at it, who stayed, what you've shipped repeatedly rather than once.
Are they like us? Not demographically — temperamentally. A procurement lead at a health insurer and a founder at a climate startup want to recognise themselves in how you talk about risk, speed and quality. This is where voice does its work.
Will they still exist in eighteen months? The unspoken question behind every agency engagement. Size, tenure, client retention and working model are all proxies for permanence. Answer the question they won't ask out loud.

Every section of a good About page maps to one of these three questions. If a section maps to none of them — your office's exposed brick, your Friday drinks trolley — it's decoration, and decoration on a decision page is noise.

A story in one paragraph, not a timeline

The standard About page is a chronological timeline: founded, hired, moved, pivoted. Timelines are how organisations remember themselves, not how strangers come to trust them. Nobody's trust has ever been earned by the year you got a bigger office.

What earns trust is a single sharp paragraph that says: what we believe, why we exist, and who we exist for. Write it last, after everything else on the page is done, and write it the way you'd say it across a table. Ours, in essence, is: software should feel alive; we exist to build it for people who care about craft; we're small on purpose. Yours will be different. The test is whether a competitor could publish the same paragraph without lying. "We're a passionate team delivering innovative solutions" passes that test for four thousand agencies, which means it fails for you.

If you must keep a timeline, compress it into four beats and make each beat a decision, not an event: when you chose to stay independent, when you dropped a service line, when you took a bet that paid off. Decisions reveal character. Anniversaries reveal a calendar.

Numbers that earn trust — and numbers that burn it

Founders love big round numbers: "500+ projects delivered!", "10x growth!", "award-winning!". Vague superlatives trigger the same scepticism as a stranger who is too friendly. The numbers that build trust share three properties: they're specific, they're slightly awkward, and they're about consistency rather than scale.

Consistency beats scale. "We've been shipping since 2014" is stronger than "500 projects", because it answers the permanence question. "Average client relationship: 3.2 years" says more about quality than any testimonial, because clients vote with renewals.
Precision signals honesty. "About 45 people" reads as a guess; "45 people across Sydney, Wellington, Singapore and London" reads as someone who counted. Precision is a credibility tell. Audiences can smell a rounded-up number.
Admit a constraint. The most persuasive sentence on our page is effectively "we're not for everyone — we're small and we say no a lot." A stated limitation is proof the other claims were considered, not pasted from a template. One honest "we don't do X" buys more trust than five "we're great at Y"s.

The fuller case for treating claims this way is in our piece on social proof without the cringe — the short version is that proof works in proportion to how checkable it feels.

The team section is evidence, not a phone directory

The team grid is where About pages go to die: forty identical headshots with a name and a title, communicating nothing except that everyone owns a black t-shirt. But done properly, people are the strongest evidence on the page — they are the continuity, the capability and the temperament, all at once.

Three rules we hold to:

Show real people, honestly rendered. Stock photos are a lie visitors detect in under a second. We use stylised illustrated portraits, partly for consistency across a distributed team and partly because an illustration that is clearly an illustration is more honest than a photo retouched past recognition. Whatever the medium, every person gets a one-line note written in their own voice — something they'd actually say, not "Jane is passionate about synergy." Our team index works because each profile opens into a real page with their work and writing attached, so the claim "senior people do the work" is verifiable one click deep.

Show the shape of the team, not just the stars. If your credo is "small senior squads", the team page should prove the seniority mix. If juniors exist, show them — hiding them undermines the story, because clients will meet them in week two anyway.

Locations are information. For a remote-first team, the map of where people live answers a practical buyer question (will their hours overlap mine?) and quietly proves the remote model is real, not aspirational.

Prove it elsewhere; don't re-argue it here

The About page's final job is routing. By the time someone has read your story, met your numbers and scanned your team, they're ready to either look at work again or make contact. Give them both exits, clearly.

What you should not do is duplicate your entire portfolio and testimonial wall onto the About page. Link out instead — to two or three case studies that best embody the values you just claimed. If you say you're fast, link the engagement that shipped in six weeks. If you say you do honest measurement, link the study that reports a number that went down before it went up, like we did in the Larklight SaaS relaunch. A claim followed by a receipt is the entire mechanics of trust in one move.

And end with a contact prompt written for where the reader now is. Not "Get in touch!" but something that matches the conversation they're about to start: "Tell us what you're building." The best About pages behave like the best salespeople — they close by making it easy to say the next true thing.

Editorial craft: this page is an essay, so design it like one

Structurally, an About page is long-form editorial content wearing a navigation bar, and it deserves the same care as your best journal piece. A strong display headline with a point of view. Short paragraphs. A fluid type scale that keeps the reading line comfortable at every width. Generous white space around the team grid so faces don't become wallpaper. Pull the one sentence you most want remembered into a display moment — the way a magazine editor would, which we dig into in editorial devices for the web.

And pace it. Alternate dense and sparse. Story (text), numbers (compact facts), team (visual grid), belief (one big statement), exits (links). The rhythm itself communicates a working style: considered, unhurried, confident enough to not fill every pixel.

Measuring whether it works

Two numbers tell you if the page is doing its job. First, About-to-contact conversion: of the sessions that view About, what share reach the contact page or start a brief? This is the page's reason to exist; instrument it as a named funnel, not a vibe. Second, engaged reading time: About pages get skimmed by everyone and read properly by the two hundred people a year who are deciding whether to hire you. Optimise for the readers. When we rebuilt this page for a services client, total time-on-page dropped 20% while contact starts from About rose by half — fewer tourists, more buyers. That's the correct trade.

Key takeaways

The About page is the closing argument of your sales process. Visitors arrive asking three questions: are they good enough, are they like us, will they still exist in eighteen months.
Replace the timeline with one sharp paragraph of belief, and compress history into decisions, not events.
Trust numbers are specific, slightly awkward, and about consistency. One admitted constraint outperforms five superlatives.
The team grid is evidence: honest portraits, real voices, visible seniority, actual locations.
Don't re-argue your proof on the About page — route to two or three case studies that act as receipts for the claims.
Measure About-to-contact conversion and engaged reading time, and be willing to lose tourists to win buyers.

Frequently asked questions

How long should an About page be? Long enough to answer the three trust questions, and not one section longer. For most services businesses that's 400–900 words plus a team section. If you need two more paragraphs to explain your founding myth, you probably need one better sentence instead.

Should the founder's story be on the page? If the founder is genuinely part of the buying decision — as in small studios and professional services — yes, but as one component, not the whole page. Write it in first person, keep it under 150 words, and connect it to what the company does now rather than what the founder did then.

Is video worth it on an About page? Only if it shows something text can't: the working environment, the way people talk to each other, the texture of a workshop. A talking-head montage over royalty-free music adds weight without evidence. If you do use video, keep it under ninety seconds, muted by default, with captions.

How often should we update it? On a trigger, not a schedule: when the team size moves meaningfully, when a number on the page goes stale, when your positioning sharpens. A quarterly ten-minute review is enough. The worst About pages are the ones that still describe the company of three years ago — visitors assume everything else on the site is equally out of date.