Look at the analytics on almost any small business site and the About page shows up as a quiet little page that people visit right before they reach out. That's my experience building sites since 2002, anyway. I can't hand you a study. But I've watched it play out enough times to have an opinion.
Someone lands on your homepage, likes what they see, and then has a small doubt. Is this an actual person? Are they local? Have they done this before? The About page is where that doubt gets answered or doesn't.
So most About pages fail at the one job they have.
The mission statement problem
You know the page. "We are passionate about delivering excellence to our valued clients." It could be about a dentist, a roofer, or a software company. Nobody has ever hired someone because of that paragraph.
Passion isn't the question. The visitor wants to know who they'd be dealing with.
What to put there instead
Start with a photo of you. A real one, taken by a friend with a decent phone, is fine. A stock photo of people shaking hands is worse than no photo at all.
Then say, in plain sentences, what you do and where you do it. "I've been a licensed electrician in Tulsa for eleven years" beats three paragraphs of values. Put the number of years, the town, and the kind of work up top.
After that, one short story if you have it. Why you started, or a job you're proud of. Two or three sentences. Skip the childhood backstory.
Finish with a way to reach you. This is the part people forget. Someone who just decided you're real is at the exact moment they'd contact you, so put the phone number, email, or contact form right there instead of making them hunt for it.
If you're a team of one
Say so. "It's just me" is a selling point for a lot of buyers. They know who's showing up, and they know nobody's passing their job to a subcontractor they've never met.
If you don't like writing about yourself
Almost nobody does. Try answering out loud the question a new customer would ask over coffee: "So how did you get into this?" Record it, type up what you said, and trim it. It'll sound more like you than anything you'd write staring at a blank page.
This is also where an AI first draft can help, as long as you rewrite it in your own words afterward. Starter kits on Cantrip come with an About page already sketched out, which is useful, but the facts in it are placeholders. Only you know how many years you've been at this.
A quick check
Read your About page and ask whether a stranger could tell your name, your town, and what you do in ten seconds. If they can't, fix that before you touch anything else on the site.