Financial Services Website Design: A Checklist

A financial website is read by three audiences at once: customers deciding whether to trust you, regulators and payment partners checking what you promise, and search engines that hold money topics to a higher standard. Most design advice covers only the first. This checklist covers all three, for brokers, funds, fintechs, lenders and trading businesses.

What must a regulated financial website disclose?

Every regulator words it differently, but the principle is the same: marketing must be fair and balanced. FINRA Rule 2210 requires broker-dealer communications to be "fair and balanced" and bans predicting or projecting performance; retail communications need a principal's approval before use. In the UK, COBS 4.2.1R says a financial promotion must be "fair, clear and not misleading". For CFDs, ESMA's 2018 measures introduced a standardised risk warning, and the national regulator analyses behind it showed 74–89% of retail CFD accounts typically lose money.

• Legal entity name, registered address and registration or licence numbers, in the footer of every page.
• Risk warnings in the format your regulator requires, near the claims they qualify, not only in the footer.
• Performance, rates and fees with the basis and period stated.
• Who the service is not for: restricted countries and eligibility.
• Complaints process and, where relevant, the ombudsman or dispute body.

Which trust signals matter on a financial site?

Trust signals only work if a visitor can check them. A licence number that links to the regulator's register beats a row of badges. Named people with real backgrounds beat stock photos. A clear "how we make money" page beats a slogan.

• Regulator register links next to licence numbers.
• Leadership page with names, roles and backgrounds.
• How the business makes money, including affiliate or referral income.
• Security and data handling explained in plain words.
• Reviews from independent platforms, with no gating of negative reviews.

Why does accessibility matter more for financial sites?

Because it is now a legal requirement in more places, and most sites fail it. The European Accessibility Act covers banking and payment services and e-commerce, and applies to services provided to consumers after 28 June 2025. The technical benchmark is WCAG; version 2.2 is the current W3C Recommendation.

The WebAIM Million 2026 report found detectable WCAG failures on 95.9% of the top million home pages, averaging about 56 errors each. The most common were low-contrast text (83.9% of pages), images without alt text (53.1%) and form inputs without labels (51%). All three are design decisions, and all three are common on finance sites with pale grey text and long application forms.

How fast does a financial website need to be?

Use Google's Core Web Vitals as the target, measured at the 75th percentile of real visits on mobile and desktop: Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less (web.dev). Calculators, rate tables and charts are the usual offenders; design them to load without shifting the page. See our glossary entry on Core Web Vitals.

How should design and compliance work together?

Most delays on financial sites come from compliance seeing the design late. Bring the reviewer in at the start.

• Agree the claims list first: every promise the site will make, with its evidence and required warning.
• Design disclosure slots into every template, so warnings are never squeezed in after sign-off.
• Keep copy in a reviewable document or CMS with version history, not only in design files.
• Record who approved each page and when, and repeat the review when copy changes.
• Test the finished site on a phone: disclosures must be readable there, not only on desktop.

What is YMYL and how does it affect design?

Google calls topics that can affect people's health, finances, safety or wellbeing "Your Money or Your Life" (YMYL) and gives extra weight to signals of experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust (E-E-A-T) for them; it says "trust is most important". In design terms that means author names and credentials on articles, visible review dates, sources for every figure and an about page that answers who is behind the site. More in our fintech SEO guide.

The financial services website checklist

Use this before launch and at every redesign.

Who designs websites for financial businesses?

Pick a designer who will work with your compliance reviewer, not around them, and who builds disclosures into the layout instead of adding them at the end. PipValley builds websites for prop firms, which our team operates, and for the trading businesses next to them; we have not built a site for a bank, lender or fintech client yet. See websites for fintech startups and websites for forex brokers, or check what a prop firm site needs in our prop firm website checklist.

Questions

Sources

1. FINRA Rule 2210: Communications with the public
2. FCA Handbook: COBS 4.2, fair, clear and not misleading rule
3. ESMA: ESMA agrees to prohibit binary options and restrict CFDs (Mar 2018)
4. European Commission: European Accessibility Act
5. W3C: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2
6. WebAIM: The WebAIM Million, 2026 report
7. web.dev: Web Vitals
8. Google Search Central: Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content (updated Oct 5, 2026)