What Belongs on an IR Homepage? A Checklist for Getting It Right
A practical checklist for what an IR homepage should show above the fold, from financial highlights to the one gap almost every IR site still has.
In short
An IR homepage should put four things in front of a visitor immediately: financial highlights, share price and market data, an events and reporting calendar, and one clear route into full disclosure. The companies that get this right keep these elements live on the page itself, not buried behind a download or scattered across sub pages that require several clicks to find. A homepage that makes an investor hunt for the last results or the next reporting date is already losing that visitor's attention before the content even matters. And across the IR websites we review, one gap keeps returning regardless of company size or industry: a way for an investor to ask a question and get an answer sourced from the company's own disclosures, rather than piecing one together from whatever a search engine or a general AI tool happens to surface.
Key facts
- Financial highlights, the latest results, and an events calendar work best when they sit directly on the IR landing page, not one click deeper.
- A share price widget alone is now the baseline. What separates a strong page from an average one is the context placed next to it.
- ESG information reads as more credible when it is connected to the financial story, rather than kept on a fully separate page.
- The gap we keep finding on IR homepages is the absence of a way for investors to get a direct, sourced answer to their own question.
What financial information should appear the moment someone lands on the page?
Financial highlights belong on the page itself, not one click away. A first time visitor, whether that is an institutional analyst doing a quick screen or a retail shareholder checking in after results day, should see key figures such as revenue, margin, and guidance without opening a PDF or navigating through several sub pages. The pattern that separates strong IR homepages from average ones is simple: the numbers are on the page, not in the download. This does not mean replacing the full report. It means giving the visitor enough to orient themselves in a few seconds, so the decision to go deeper is an informed one rather than a guess.
A dedicated subpage for full KPI detail and archived results is useful too, but it should support the homepage summary, not replace it. When the only way to see this year's revenue is to open last quarter's presentation, the homepage has failed at its most basic job. The highlights section also does not need to be static. A small set of figures updated each reporting period, framed the same way each time, builds a habit for repeat visitors and makes period on period comparison effortless.
How prominent should the share price widget be, and what should sit next to it?
A share price widget is now standard practice on almost every IR site, so it is not on its own a differentiator. Nearly every listed company shows a live or near live price somewhere on the investor page, and a visitor now expects to find it without searching. What separates the leaders is what sits next to it. Pairing the price chart with a total return calculator lets an investor model actual return, including dividends reinvested, rather than just watch a line move up or down. Adding index comparison or dividend history directly alongside the chart does similar work, since it turns a single data point into a story about performance over time.
A widget on its own answers where the price is now. A widget with context answers the question an investor actually came with, which is usually closer to how this investment has performed, and against what. The difference in effort to build this is small. The difference in usefulness to the reader is significant, and it is one of the easiest upgrades on this entire list.
What should a financial calendar communicate beyond just dates?
A calendar that lists a results date and nothing else is doing half the job. The strongest pages link every calendar entry to something usable afterward: a webcast replay, a transcript, or a downloadable presentation, so an investor who missed the live call still gets the full picture instead of a bare announcement that the call happened. This matters most in the days right after results, when search interest in a company is at its highest and a visitor arriving late should not be met with a dead end.
A visible subscription or alert option is the other piece that is easy to skip and costly to skip. When it is buried in a footer or missing entirely, fewer people ever see the next update, and the company loses a low cost way of keeping its own audience informed without relying on them to check back manually. A calendar that only looks forward is also incomplete. Keeping past events visible, with their replays intact, shows a visitor that the company treats its communication as a consistent record rather than a series of one off announcements.
How much ESG belongs on the homepage itself, and how much can stay linked?
ESG content works best when it sits next to the financial story, not in a separate silo. When sustainability data and financial results are referenced alongside each other, the two narratives read as one, consistent story about the company, rather than two departments that happen to share a website. Keeping ESG on a fully separate page, disconnected from the investor section, is a common missed opportunity rather than a compliance problem, since the company is usually already producing the data, just not surfacing it where an investor is looking.
The homepage does not need a full ESG dashboard, but a short pointer to current ratings and targets, placed near the financial highlights, does real work. A single line noting a rating agency score or a headline emissions target, with a link into the fuller sustainability content, gives an investor enough context to know the topic is being managed seriously without forcing them to leave the financial narrative to find out.
How should the rest of the IR section be organised so this content is easy to find?
None of the above matters if a visitor cannot find it quickly once they leave the homepage. A clear, dedicated navigation tab for investor relations, with logical sub sections for reports, presentations, governance, and share information, is the baseline every well run IR site should meet. Consistent placement matters as much as the labels themselves. When the same type of document lives in a different place on every visit, or when older material is harder to find than the current period, the site is quietly teaching visitors not to trust it as a reliable archive.
A basic search function inside the investor section, even a simple filter by document type and year, solves a large share of this problem on its own. It is one of the more overlooked items on this list precisely because it is not visible until it is missing, and a visitor who cannot find last year's annual report in under a minute is unlikely to try much longer before giving up.
What is missing from nearly every IR homepage right now?
This is the gap that keeps returning in our reviews, independent of sector or company size: no assistant answers investor questions directly from the company's own approved information. Investors already ask AI tools about a company before they ever reach the IR site, and right now there is usually nothing directing those questions back to material the issuer actually controls. This is a relatively new expectation, so it is not surprising most sites have not addressed it yet, but it is worth naming clearly since it is quickly becoming as basic an expectation as the share price widget was a decade ago.
The practical risk is not that an investor fails to find an answer. It is that they find one anyway, from a source the company had no part in shaping, and treat it as accurate simply because it was fast and confident sounding. A homepage that gives no path back to verified, company approved information leaves that gap entirely unmanaged. Closing it is what a source-grounded assistant does, and MIRA is such an assistant.
The bottom line
An IR homepage earns trust by putting financial highlights, share price context, and a working events calendar directly on the page, by keeping ESG connected to the financial story rather than off in its own corner, and by making the rest of the investor section genuinely easy to search and navigate. The gap we keep finding, across companies of every size and industry, is a way for investors to get a direct, sourced answer to their own question, and it is the item on this checklist we still see unsolved most often.
Find out how your homepage scores on this checklist. Request an IR-website review: a human-delivered assessment of your investor pages against your peers, with prioritised recommendations.