Most founders write the About page once, in the week they registered the domain, and never open the file again. Two years later it still describes a company at a stage it left behind, in language borrowed from a pitch that stopped being accurate a long time ago - while the homepage above it has been redesigned four times in the same window.
Who actually reads it
The About page gets a small fraction of a site’s total traffic, and almost all of that fraction is someone doing due diligence: a candidate deciding whether to accept an offer, a journalist confirming a fact before a story runs, an investor’s associate building a memo, a large customer’s procurement team confirming exactly who they’re about to sign with. Homepage traffic is mostly casual. About-page traffic is people a few clicks away from a decision that commits them to something.
What the neglected version actually signals
A stale About page tells that reader the company stopped paying attention to its own story right after launch - and invites the obvious follow-on question about what else has been left on autopilot since. That’s a worse signal than having a thin page at all, because it’s evidence, not absence. A three-year-old founding narrative sitting next to a two-week-old blog post makes the mismatch obvious instead of invisible, at exactly the moment a skeptical reader is looking for a reason to doubt.
The fix is smaller than it feels
Rewriting the About page isn’t a rebrand project, and treating it like one is why most founders avoid it. It’s an annual ten-minute edit: does the founding story still match what the company actually does today, does the team section list people who still work there, does the customer count or the funding stage match reality. Most founders skip even that because the page feels finished - when what it actually is, is frozen.
What this means practically
Treat the About page like the resume it functions as: a document a stranger reads once, right before deciding something that matters, and quietly judges for signs of neglect. The homepage sells the product. The About page vouches for the people building it - and a vouching document nobody has touched in two years isn’t vouching for anything.