Why Your "About" Copy Belongs Nowhere Near the Fold

There’s a particular kind of homepage I see over and over. The headline says something like “We’re passionate about transforming how teams work.” The subheadline mentions that the company was founded in 2019 by veterans of some other company. There’s a paragraph about the mission. And somewhere, three screens down, you finally learn what the product does.

This is the About page wearing the homepage’s clothes. And it’s one of the most reliable ways to lose a first-time visitor, because it answers a question nobody asked yet.

Consider the order of questions in a stranger’s head. When someone lands on your site, their first question is not “who are these people?” It’s “what is this, and does it solve my problem?” Only after that gets a yes do they start caring about you. Who made this? Can I trust them? Are they going to be around next year? Those are real questions, and your founding story and credentials answer them well. But they’re second questions, and putting second answers first means the visitor has to wade through material that’s irrelevant to them at that moment. Most won’t wade. They’ll leave.

The reason companies get this backwards is understandable, even sympathetic. The people writing the homepage are the people who lived the story. To them, the founding insight, the mission, the years of work, these are the most interesting facts about the company. And they are interesting, to them. The homepage becomes a mirror: it reflects what the company finds fascinating about itself rather than what a stranger needs to know. I’ve done this myself. The first draft of almost every homepage I’ve written started with what I was proud of instead of what the visitor was looking for.

There’s also a subtler force at work. Writing “we help ambitious teams unlock their potential” is easy, because it commits you to nothing. Writing “we make software that schedules shifts for restaurants” is hard, because now you’ve drawn a boundary. Some visitors will read it and leave, and that feels like failure. But it’s the opposite. The visitors who leave because your plain description doesn’t match their problem were never going to buy. The mission statement wasn’t retaining them; it was just delaying their departure by a few confused seconds. Vague copy doesn’t widen your audience. It just hides your product from the people it’s actually for.

So what belongs at the top instead? The visitor’s problem and your answer to it, in words the visitor would use. Not your category, not your vision, not your differentiation from competitors the visitor hasn’t heard of. If you sell accounting software for veterinary clinics, the top of the page should make a veterinarian think “this is for me” within one breath. Everything else, including everything about you, is downstream of that recognition.

None of this means your story doesn’t matter. It matters a lot, in the right place. The About page is a genuinely important page, and people do visit it, but notice when they visit it: after they’ve decided your product might be relevant, when they’re evaluating whether to trust you with money or data. At that point your story isn’t noise, it’s evidence. “Built by people who ran veterinary clinics for a decade” is a powerful sentence on an About page and a wasted one in a hero. Same words, different moment, opposite effect. Credentials also work well lower on the homepage, after the product is clear, where they function as reassurance rather than introduction. The mistake isn’t having the copy. It’s the placement.

There’s a simple test for whether your fold has this disease. Read everything visible before scrolling and count how many sentences have your company as the subject. “We believe.” “We’re building.” “Our mission.” “Founded by.” Then count how many have the visitor, or the visitor’s problem, as the subject. If the first count beats the second, you’ve written an About page and put it at the top of your site. When I review sites with GazeSite, the tool I built for auditing pages, this we-to-you imbalance is one of the most common clarity findings, and it’s common precisely because it feels natural to the writer. Talking about yourself always does.

The fix is mechanical and a little humbling. Take everything above the fold that’s about you and move it down, or move it to the About page where it can do its real job. Then fill the vacated space with a plain statement of what the product does and who it’s for. Your page will feel less inspiring to you. It will feel much clearer to everyone else. And clarity is the only kind of inspiration a stranger can act on.

You get to tell your story. You just have to earn the telling first, and the way you earn it is by being immediately, unmistakably useful. First be understood. Then be known.