Yes, and usually the people who matter most. Buyers checking whether you are real, journalists deciding whether to quote you, candidates deciding whether to apply, and partners deciding whether to sign. It is a low-traffic page with unusually high-stakes visitors, which is exactly backwards from how most companies treat it.
We see this pattern on nearly every site we take over. The homepage gets six rounds of revisions. The About page gets whatever the founder typed in 2019, still describing a company that no longer exists in that shape.
The good news is that it is one of the easiest pages to fix well. There is real research on what people want from it, and the answer is less interesting and more practical than most agencies pretend.
Clarity about who you are, what you do, and who you do it for, stated plainly and near the top. A good About page answers the visitor's actual question, which is almost never "what is your origin story" and almost always "can I trust you with this". Everything else is supporting detail.
Nielsen Norman Group's research on this is direct. In her 2015 article on About Us summaries, Hoa Loranger's core guideline is to provide key information on major About Us pages, in brief, scannable summaries, rather than making people drill down to find foundational facts about the company.
That phrase "drill down" is doing the work. The failure mode is not that companies leave information out. It is that they bury it two clicks deep behind a mission statement.
The summary a stranger needs to place you. What the company does, who it serves, roughly how big it is, where it operates, and how long it has been going. A person should be able to read the first screen and correctly describe you to a colleague.
Loranger's research found a specific consequence for getting this wrong. Users perceive transparent, upfront answers as a sign of an efficient organisation, while buried information reads as evasiveness. Nobody consciously thinks "this company is hiding something because their About page opens with a paragraph about passion", but the impression forms anyway.
She also points at the halo effect, where the first impression of one page colours the perception of the whole site. That is a strong argument for putting the plainest, most concrete sentence you have at the very top.
Our own test is simple. If you deleted every adjective from your first paragraph, would anything factual survive? If not, you have written a mood rather than an introduction.
Because they are written for the company rather than the reader. The page becomes a place to record what the founders believe about themselves, in language chosen to sound impressive to peers. The visitor wanted to know whether you have done this before for someone like them.
The second failure is vagueness disguised as ambition. "We empower businesses to unlock their potential" describes a consultancy, a software company, a bank, and a gym equally well. A sentence that could belong to anyone tells the reader nothing about you.
The third is staleness. An About page that quietly describes a team of four when you are now eleven, or a service you stopped offering, does more damage than a thin page. It suggests nobody has looked at the site in years, which the visitor will assume applies to everything else too.
Nielsen Norman Group's Aurora Harley set out four credibility factors in 2016, and they map neatly onto the About page. Design quality, upfront disclosure, comprehensive and current content, and being connected to the rest of the web. Each one is something you can audit rather than an opinion about taste.
On design quality, Harley's framing is that "the first step to garnering trust is to make your site appear legitimate and professional." That is a low bar in principle and one a surprising number of sites still fail, usually through inconsistency rather than ugliness.
On upfront disclosure, the research emphasises being open with all information relating to the customer experience, including contact details, pricing, and fees. A company that makes you hunt for a way to contact them has already answered a question the visitor was asking.
The fourth factor is the one people ignore. Harley writes that businesses and their websites "cannot live in a vacuum", and recommends linking out to third-party sources so credibility does not rest entirely on company-sponsored content. Your own claims about yourself are the weakest evidence you can offer.
If you are selling anything that depends on judgment, yes. People buy from people, and a page with real faces and real names is far harder to dismiss than a page of stock photography. For a services business, the team is the product.
There is a caveat we give clients honestly. A team section that goes stale is worse than none. If your team changes often, a smaller permanent section about how the team works beats a grid of headshots you will not maintain.
The visual side matters more than people expect here. Faces attract the eye strongly, so a team grid placed badly will pull attention away from whatever you actually wanted read first. That is a straightforward application of visual hierarchy, and it is worth thinking through before adding photos.
More than its traffic suggests, because it is where a search engine or a model works out what kind of entity you are. Google's own guidance on creating helpful content asks whether it is "self-evident to your visitors who authored your content" and whether bylines "lead to further information about the author or authors involved."
Google states it plainly in the same documentation: "We strongly encourage adding accurate authorship information, such as bylines to content where readers might expect it." Those bylines have to lead somewhere, and the somewhere is usually an About or author page.
Google's self-assessment questions also now cover disclosure of automation, asking whether the use of AI generation is self-evident to visitors through disclosures or other means. That is a question worth answering on your About page rather than hoping nobody wonders.
This is the practical end of the concept we covered in our piece on what E-E-A-T is and how to prove it. Experience and expertise have to be visible somewhere concrete on the site, and the About page is the natural home for them.
As long as it takes to answer the real questions, and structured so nobody has to read all of it. The research points toward brief, scannable summaries at the top with depth available below, which means length is less important than order.
In practice we find the useful shape is a short factual summary, then what you do and who for, then evidence, then the people, then how to start a conversation. A visitor who leaves after the first screen should still have got the important part.
We would rather see a tight page that is true than a long one padded with values nobody will act on. A list of adjectives about integrity and innovation is the part every visitor skips, and everyone knows it.
Specific, checkable things. Numbers you will stand behind, named clients if you are allowed to name them, real outcomes, certifications, and links to places where other people talk about you. Harley's fourth credibility factor is exactly this, and it is the difference between claiming to be good and showing it.
Be careful that the evidence is current and defensible. A statistic on your site is a promise, and a prospect who finds it contradicted elsewhere will not ask you about it. They will just leave.
Testimonials belong here too, though they work harder when they are specific about a situation rather than complimentary in general. We went into what makes that believable in our piece on designing social proof people actually believe.
Give the reader an obvious next step that matches where they are. Someone finishing your About page is usually further along than someone landing on your homepage, so the ending should be an invitation to talk rather than an invitation to learn more.
Keep it proportionate. A hard sell at the end of a page about who you are reads badly, and a page that just stops reads worse. One clear, warm line pointing at a conversation is enough.
Read your first paragraph out loud and ask whether a stranger could repeat it back accurately. If they could not, rewrite it as one plain sentence about what you do and who for, and put that at the very top. That single edit fixes most About pages.
Then check the facts. Team size, locations, services, any numbers, and whether contact details are easy to find without scrolling. Fix anything that is out of date, and put a note in your calendar to do this again in six months.
If you would like a second opinion on whether your About page is doing its job, or you are rebuilding one and want it to earn its place, we are happy to take a look. Let's talk. You can reach our team at phoenix.studio.
Tell us where you want to go. We'll tell you how we'd get you there.