What the About Page on Your Business Website Should Actually Say

Here is a scenario I see repeat itself almost every week. It is a composite of patterns I watch unfold with Irish business owners, not one specific case, but walking through it as a single story makes the lesson land harder.

A boutique hotel owner on the Wild Atlantic Way opens her analytics dashboard on a grey Tuesday morning in March. She notices something she had never spotted before. Her About page is the second-most-visited page on her entire website. And most of the people who land on it leave without ever clicking through to the booking page.

That combination tells you everything. Visitors came looking for a reason to trust her. They did not find one. They left.

This is the most common pattern I see when I sit down with Irish business owners. The About page is treated as a bio. In reality, it is the room where every hesitant visitor makes their final decision. Most of them are losing the decision quietly, and the owner never knows it happened.

The About page is not a bio. It is an answer.

Here is the mistake almost every business owner makes. They write the About page for themselves. They include founding dates, a mission statement, values, maybe a team photo taken at a Christmas party. All of it factually correct. None of it answering the question the visitor actually has.

Nielsen Norman Group have been studying how people read company websites for more than two decades. Their research on About Us pages is blunt. Users peek at top-level pages looking for answers to foundational questions, and they will not drill deeper if the surface is vague ^[1]. When visitors cannot find concrete facts quickly, they perceive the site as evasive rather than mysterious. They close the tab.

That matches what I hear from customers almost weekly. "I was about to contact them and then I couldn't tell who actually did the work, so I moved on." That is a lost lead, and the business owner will never know it happened.

Google's E-E-A-T framework made this explicit. Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness are what Google's quality raters are told to look for, and of those four, Trust is singled out as the most important ^[2]. Your About page is where Trust is either established or lost.

What the old page was saying

The hotel owner's original About page was three short paragraphs. It mentioned the year the family bought the property. It referred to "warm Irish hospitality". It ended with "we look forward to welcoming you". There was a generic photograph of the reception desk.

Read that as a first-time visitor. A couple in Manchester looking for a weekend away have found the site through a Google search. They have never been to that stretch of coast. They are weighing this hotel against two others sitting in browser tabs. What does the About page answer for them?

Almost nothing. It confirms the business exists. It does not explain why to book there specifically, or what kind of stay to expect, or whether the place has any character beyond the standard template.

Compare that to what the couple actually want to know. Is this place run by someone who cares, or is it a faceless investment vehicle? How far is it from the nearest town? Is it child-friendly? Does the owner actually live on-site, or is the manager a revolving door? Are the reviews genuine or bought?

Those are the questions sitting in the visitor's head the moment they click "About". If the page does not address them, the page has failed its job.

How she rewrote it

This is where most owners panic. They assume rewriting the About page means writing something creative or clever. It does not. It means answering the questions your visitors are already asking, in order, with specifics.

Here is what the new version did in roughly 400 words.

The opening line resolved the basics in three seconds. "We are a seven-room boutique hotel in Clare, run by the family who has owned it for twenty-two years." Not "warm Irish hospitality". An actual sentence that answers who, where, and how long.

A named person was introduced behind the business. A short paragraph on the owner. A real photograph of her, taken outdoors on-site. Not corporate. Not staged. Just the person a guest would meet at reception.

Next came the real objections. UK couples searching for a weekend in the west wanted to know how to get there. The new page told them directly: "we are forty minutes from Shannon Airport, thirty from Lahinch". That line removed more hesitation than any mission statement could.

Specifics replaced platitudes. Room count. Breakfast details. A line about the weekly changeover day. Numbers where numbers existed.

Finally, the page linked out to proof. Verified TripAdvisor reviews, a feature in a travel magazine, a mention by a visiting food writer. Evidence other people had already trusted the place.

Critically, the rewrite was deployed to a staging environment first. She wrote the new copy following our step-by-step guide to staging environments and previewed the result before pushing it to production. If you are rewriting a page that real customers read, you verify it in staging before production. That is the professional habit.

I will admit where I have gone wrong on this before. Years ago I advised a client to condense their About page into a single tight paragraph to fit a redesign. The block that mentioned the owner's name and credentials got cut. Enquiries dropped inside two months. Took me a while to connect the dots. Would not make that call again.

What changed after

I cannot give you a specific percentage for the uplift. That would be fabricating evidence.

What I can tell you is what she saw qualitatively. Enquiries originating from the About page rose noticeably in the first month. Average time on the page went up. And the pattern of traffic changed: visitors who landed on About were more likely to continue through to the booking page rather than bounce out to a competitor.

More importantly, her next step became easier. She could point new customers at specific, verifiable details. When someone rang to enquire, the conversation started ten rungs further up the ladder because the About page had already done the introductions.

That is what a working About page buys you. Not a magic conversion lift, but warmer conversations and fewer wasted enquiries.

Where the About page cannot help

Here is the reality check. An About page cannot save a site that is broken elsewhere. If your booking page takes twelve seconds to load on mobile, no amount of warm storytelling will fix that. If your navigation is confusing, a great About page just means more people bounce further down.

The About page is the closer, not the door. It seals a decision the visitor has already half-made. It cannot generate the visit in the first place. It cannot rescue a site that fails on speed, clarity, or contact details.

If you are rewriting your About page while ignoring those other issues, you are sanding the furniture while the roof leaks. Fix the structural issues first.

When a minimal About page is fine

This is where I give the honest concession. Not every business needs a detailed About page.

If your business runs almost entirely on referrals, and new customers arrive already briefed by the person who recommended you, a minimal About page is genuinely fine. A sentence or two to confirm the business exists. A contact form. Done. Enterprise consultancies and certain trade specialists work this way, and dressing the page up would be effort wasted.

But that is not most Irish businesses. Most are acquiring new customers through search, and those customers are strangers who need a reason to trust you. For them, the About page is where the trust is either earned or lost.

The takeaway

The About page is not a formality. It is the page where the visitor quietly decides whether to keep going or close the tab.

If you are still building your site, the quickest way to a working first draft is described in our piece on how to build a professional website in 60 seconds with AI. Web60's AI website builder creates a starter site in under a minute, About page included, generated from what you tell it about your business. That first draft gets you started. The real work is the second draft, the one you write once you know who is reading it and what they are really asking.

Look at your current About page with a stranger's eyes. Read it out loud. Ask: if a couple looking for a weekend away, a procurement manager comparing three accountants, or a bride comparing venues found this page through Google this morning, would they have a reason to keep going? Or would they close the tab and move on?

That is the only test that matters.

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