At Copia we’ve been building investor websites for listed companies for over 20 years, and every one follows rules we’ve refined over that time.
Designing an investor website is a balancing act between design, content, and compliance. It has to meet regulatory disclosure obligations, follow WCAG accessibility standards, and serve very different audiences who all want different content. It also has to be visible in search engines and AI tools, because that is how most investors will find it.
Information architecture
Information architecture is how a site’s content is structured, organised and labelled. If this is done well it helps visitors to a site navigate around it and get what they want out of their visit.
Visitors arrive with specific things to do such as, find the latest results, check the share price, download the annual report, register for an event, read the latest RNS or see who’s on the Board and running the company. The navigation should make each of those reachable in one or two clicks.
Institutional analysts, retail investors and journalists have different needs. Analysts want raw data, models and consensus. Retail investors want context, plain language and visual summaries. Consider giving each group its own entry point or level of detail.
Regulatory and disclosure requirements
UK-listed companies must meet the Listing Rules and a few core obligations. Market-moving announcements should be published without delay and archived. Annual and half-year reports need to remain available for at least ten years. AGM materials, notices, agendas, and voting results should be easy to find. Companies operating across jurisdictions also need to consider US disclosure rules (for ADR programmes), local market requirements, and ESEF tagging for annual reports in Europe.
10yrs
Minimum period annual and half-year reports must remain publicly available
Data integration
Share price feeds, RNS, financial history, and event calendars should ideally come from a single source to avoid the inconsistencies that plague stitched-together IR sites. This is where Ticker fits in: we can provide investor tools and the data required to populate them.
Accessibility
WCAG 2.2 AA is the standard most listed companies aim for. In the UK public sector it’s a legal requirement under the 2018 accessibility regulations. Private companies aren’t legally bound but face increasing scrutiny under the Equality Act.
Key elements to get right:
- Sufficient colour contrast across the site
- Keyboard navigation
- Alt text on charts and images
- Accessible PDFs (a common failure point: financial reports are often inaccessible)
- Proper heading structure, H1–H6, creating a hierarchical outline allowing screen readers to navigate content
- Captions and transcripts on video
- Form labels, clearly identify all fields and interactive points within a form
- Publish an accessibility statement to detail all measures taken to support users
Performance and mobile
Most analytics we see today show that mobile is now the most popular way to view a website, whether on the go or in a meeting, so a site needs to work across all devices and browsers. Pages should load quickly, charts should be interactive but lightweight, and PDFs shouldn’t be the only way to access key data.
Search, AI and discoverability
Investors often arrive via a search engine or by talking to an AI agent, so a well-constructed site, clean URLs and proper metadata help search engines find and show your content. AI tools will look at what’s written on the page, so key information such as results, dates and contacts should be in plain text rather than only in PDFs.
Privacy and cookies
Cookie banners and privacy notices need to follow data protection rules. Keep tracking to a minimum on pages where investors are accessing official company information.
Accessibility, compliance, design and discoverability all serve the same goal, which is a site that every visitor can use easily, and one that presents the company’s story and messages clearly and concisely.