In a competitive online world, your website must boast a color palette that appeals to your ideal target audience, encourages conversions, and enhances your brand's visual identity.
A distasteful color palette that doesn't provoke the right emotions can cause website visitors to leave your site and go to your competitors, causing you to miss out on sales and other conversions.
This article will examine the color wheel, explain why a website's color palette is important to visitors, and explore four factors to consider when choosing the perfect palette.
Understanding The Color Wheel
Selecting the perfect color palette requires an understanding of the color wheel, also known as the color circle.
Isaac Newton invented the color wheel in 1666 to illustrate the visual relationship between primary, secondary, and tertiary colors in a circle of color hues.
There are two types of color wheel. The red, yellow, and blue (RYB) color wheel is often used by artists to create paint colors. The red, green, and blue (RGB) color wheel is designed for online use and refers to mixing light.
With the color wheel, website designers can explore how different colors relate to each other, how particular combinations make other colors stand out, and the emotions different colors elicit.
The Importance Of A Website's Color Palette
Here are four reasons why a website's color palette is important to visitors:
Increases brand awareness
Color can increase brand awareness by 80%. When brands consistently use the same color palette across their website and marketing materials, customers are more likely to recognize the brand on different platforms and engage with it.
Take Coca-Cola for example. Their classic red and white design is associated with their brand, and appears on both their products and their site design.
Makes an excellent first impression
Color influences up to 90% of initial impressions. Picking a suitable color palette will give your website visitors a great first impression of your brand and decrease the likelihood of them leaving without converting.
Creates an emotional connection
Color psychology - which we touch more on later - has found that people associate specific colors with different emotions and feelings. So, you can use your color palette to encourage the emotions you want your target audience to feel.
As you can see here, businesses using the color yellow in their branding aim to invoke feelings of happiness, enlightenment and confidence.
Highlights important elements
You can use certain colors, such as yellow or orange, to highlight important elements on your website, such as call-to-action (CTA) buttons. The colors you pick help direct website visitors towards conversions, such as buying a product or subscribing to an email list.
Hubspot is a great example of a website that does this well. Here, you can see their CTA buttons highlighted in orange in an attempt to draw customer focus to the next stage of the sales funnel.
In addition, if you have a section that encourages visitors to learn more about a particular event or offer, using a color that has a sharp contrast to the main content on your page can direct people's eyes to it.
Four Factors To Consider When Choosing The Perfect Color Palette For Your Website
Color Combinations
Website designers should consider the different color combinations when choosing the perfect palette for their website or on-page elements.
An analogous color combination creates a low-contrast, sophisticated design using three colors that are directly beside each other on the color wheel, such as blues and purples or reds and oranges.
On the other hand, a triadic color combination creates a high-contrast, vibrant design by using three colors that are evenly spaced out across the color wheel, such as orange, purple, and green. If you were to draw a line between the colors, you would have an equilateral triangle.
Next, a monochromatic color combination creates a simple and clean design using the different colors within one hue. For example, a single base hue, such as blue, is used, followed by shades and tints of blue for the rest of the color palette.
Finally, when designing website elements—such as buttons—that need to grab a visitor's attention quickly, you will want to use complementary colors. This palette consists of two colors opposite from each other on the color wheel, such as red and blue.
Color Psychology
Color psychology studies how colors affect human behaviors and trigger emotions. This means your chosen website color palette can impact a visitor's impressions of your brand and whether or not they make a purchase.
Here is when to use (and when not to use) the colors:
- Red attracts the most attention and creates excitement, which is suitable for most types of websites, except those for luxury and professional brands.
- Yellow can draw attention to CTAs but can also become overpowering and strain the eyes, so use it sparingly.
- Orange can also draw attention to CTAs, sales, or other content you want to ensure people notice.
- Green is the easiest color for eyes to process and can work great for nature-related websites. It's less appropriate for luxury or technology websites.
- Blue is often used by large corporations because it's associated with dependability. However, it is known to curb appetite, so don't use it on food-related websites.
- Purple is soothing, which creates a sense of luxury and wealth. However, it is a poor choice for grabbing people's attention.
- Brown can stimulate appetite, making it suitable for food-related websites. However, it is unsuitable for grabbing people's attention, so don't use it for CTAs.
- Black can be modern and edgy or elegant and traditional, depending on the colors used with it. However, black can also feel menacing or evil, making people feel uncomfortable or afraid.
- White is great for healthcare, technology, or science websites. When paired with black, gold, silver, or gray, white can also be great for luxury websites.
- Grey creates a calming effect, which is great for luxury and professional websites but not ideal for grabbing visitor attention.
- Pink is ideal for feminine products or websites with content targeting women and young girls.
Visual Hierarchy
Website visitors should be able to differentiate between hero text and descriptions. This is where you have to use your color palette to create a visual hierarchy.
When designers pick specific colors for text, visitors can quickly tell which is more important. For example, a striking color will highlight the most important part of the text, whilst a more subtle color or shade can be used for other parts.
This example from SquareSpace shows us the importance of layering bolder colors over muted ‘negative space’. Here, their text stands out and draws the eye directly to the centre of the page and the CTA button.
In addition, designers can use color to help the visitor understand which parts of the website text are related and belong together.
Target Audience
Before you choose your color palette and edit your website, you must know who you are designing it for. Start by defining the age, gender, culture, and location of your target audience, then focus on how this can change your color palette.
Using Hostinger’s website design tool, you can choose from hundreds of different colors and templates that can be customized to attract your target audience.
For example, those with deteriorated retinas, commonly older people, find it challenging to process warmer colors like red, orange, and yellow. If your target audience is over 65, consider using cool colors like blues and greens.
If you’re unsure which colours to choose, Hostinger also offers a brilliant AI-web builder feature that allows you to input information on your target audience, your brand style, and your major design goals before choosing a website colour palette for a fast-tracked site design.
In addition, think about colors in cultures. The same color can mean and symbolize very different things, depending on the beliefs or knowledge of the person viewing it. For example, many cultures relate red with danger, but Hindus conversely relate yellow with danger.
The Perfect Color Palette
By considering these four factors and understanding the color wheel, you will create the perfect color palette for your website that aligns well with your brand's message and attracts your desired target audience.
Your color palette should be used consistently across your website, social media channels, mobile app, and other marketing materials to increase brand awareness and conversions.
