When about pages is worth the effort

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. About pages is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Content is the part of a project most likely to be underestimated and most likely to delay a launch. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

When it is worth it

The about page is often the second most visited. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens.

How to decide

Photos of actual people outperform stock imagery. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

How to tell if yours is fine

Pages that answer a real question outlive pages written to fill a slot in a sitemap. Three things worth confirming about about pages before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Photos of actual people outperform stock imagery — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.