Here’s a pattern we keep seeing on small business sites:
- Homepage: three sections, mostly white space, vague promise.
- About page: 2,000 words, six headings, photos of the team, history of the business, a founder letter, a values section, and a quote from a dead philosopher.
That’s an inverted trust problem.
Visitors don’t arrive at your site wanting to know where you came from. They arrive wanting to know: can you solve my problem, and can I trust you to do it? Those two questions are answered on the homepage — or not at all. If your homepage is thin and your About page is thick, you’re asking visitors to do research before you’ve earned their attention.
Nobody researches a business that hasn’t already proven itself in the first scroll.
The fix isn’t to delete your About page. It’s to redistribute trust. Move the proof to where the decision is being made.
Homepage should have:
- Who you help (named audience).
- What you do (specific outcome).
- One testimonial or result near the CTA.
- A credential or trust signal (“10+ years in X,” “built 40+ sites,” “certified in Y”).
About page should have:
- The story behind why you work this way (not a company timeline).
- The human behind the business (one photo, not five).
- What you refuse to do (values that cost you something).
- A link back to the CTA.
(For reference, you can see how we structure this on our own About page — human, short, pointed.)
An About page is a trust amplifier, not a trust vault. Its job is to make someone who is already interested say “yes, I like these people” — not to convert a cold visitor from scratch.
If your homepage can’t earn the click to About, no amount of About-page writing will save you.
Homepage does the heavy lifting. About closes the remaining doubt. Reverse the load and you’ll lose people before they ever meet you.