Content is not enough. It may sound weird, but content is just the cherry on top of your website. But you already know that. We’ve often discussed a website’s design, speed, and user experience. We addressed time and time again the importance of enhancing these elements. What rarely gets attention, though, is your website’s colors. They may sound like a second-tier task at first, but colors are just as essential to your success as your copy, content, website design, and load speed. Why? Because of branding.

Why Website Colors are important 

You don’t colorize your website simply because it looks better and more beautiful. Although, it should be a reason enough. No, you make your website colorful because each color triggers a feeling subconsciously. So, depending on your product or your website’s topic, you’d want to color it accordingly. 

But color is more than that. It’s a tool to push users to convert. About 85% of people are adamant that colors play a vital role in deciding what to buy. Moreover, 93% of customers place colors and appearance above all other factors when purchasing. 

Colors have a massive impact on brand recognition, with 80% of people connecting a certain color palette with a particular brand. In addition, a study conducted by Reboot showcases that up to 91% of people will recognize a brand simply by its colors. Still, the colors must be chosen well and correspond to the brand’s culture and messaging. For example, 91% of people recognize Google by its color palette. On the other hand, only 17% of people recognize Tiffany & Co’s colors. That says a lot about the color choices and what people expect. As a high-end jewelry store, Tiffany and Co are simply not recognizable with its turquoise colors, although its boxes are predominantly in this color. Still, people who are just becoming their clients are far more prone to associate them with white and silver or golden colors.  

Choosing the right color scheme is definitely not an easy task. However, there are some tricks that can help you with selecting the best palette for your website. 

Learn a bit of color psychology

Color psychology has been a viable tool in marketing for a long time. There have been countless studies on how people react to different colors and what associations they make with them. Thus, you have half of your job completed. No extensive and expensive research is needed to find the perfect color to represent the feeling your brand should portray. Many of these associations are universal. For example, we all associate blue with the sea, green with forests and nature, and yellow with warmth and the sun.

Still, color connections are based on cultural differences. For example, the red color in Eastern Europe is often associated with communism due to its historical past. Another study discloses that Germans associate envy with yellow, while poles with purple. For Americans, this feeling is portrayed mostly with black, green, or red, but Russians associate it with black, purple, and yellow. Thus, when choosing a color palette, you must know what the colors represent universally and what your target audience will think of them. For example, if you are selling hard-rocked-themed t-shirts, representatives of this subculture have positive connections with black, despite its universal association with death and sorrow. Still, black can be seen as the color of sophistication, mystery, or power, depending on your target group and generation. 

On the other hand, red can be perceived as the color of passion, love, and romance but also as the color of danger, forbiddance, and anger. 

The moral here is that you need to understand your audience and know how they react to specific colors before branding yourself with one. 

Scrape the top of the color theory

The color theory is vast and complicated. There’s no doubt about that, especially once you scraped the top of it. Still, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t familiarize yourself with it. 

Let’s start with the basics. There are three types of colors based on how they are created. Primary colors are natural colors, and they can’t be produced by mixing others. There are only three primary colors – red, yellow, and blue. The secondary colors are made by mixing two of the primary colors. For example, if you combine red and yellow, you will get orange. 

The tertiary colors are created by mixing primary and secondary colors. For example, if you mix blue (a primary color) and green (a mix of blue and yellow), you will get Teal. Based on the lightness of the colors and the ratio, you can get other tertiary colors as well, like Turquoise. 

Next, you need to know the warm and cold colors and their shades. The former, you probably already know. Yellow, red, and orange are classified as warm colors, while green, blue, and violet are commonly called cold colors. This will help you later understand why some colors don’t go well on your website. 

Finally, professional web designers rarely use pure colors. Most of them are either tinted (when white is added to the chosen color), shaded (when black is added to the color), or toned (when gray is added to it). Moreover, most colors are either desaturated or oversaturated, meaning they look either way sharp or mellow. Of course, there’s much more to it, but to choose the right colors for your website, this should be enough. 

All you need to know about color combinations

With this new knowledge, we are ready to start choosing some color combinations. Essentially not all colors can create a good enough mix to be most effective. Understanding color nuances is crucial when you’re choosing your color scheme. The best designers know which colors work together and how to mix and match some dyes, so they can essentially mellow down and become compatible. Thus it’s a good idea to dig a little deeper into how to mix colors properly. There are five main techniques:

Using complementary colors.

If you check the traditional color wheel, complimentary colors usually sit on opposite sides. In other terms, complementary colors are typically warm and cold. However, in this technique, combining the cold green and the warm yellow is also unacceptable, as they stay side by side on the color wheel. A great example of this technique is our own hostarmada.com. We use yellow-orange and blue-violet; as you can see, it looks gorgeous. 

Using Split complementary colors.

This technique requires three colors. You need to use a base color and two other colors adjacent to the complementary base color. For example, on the color wheel, the complementary color of red is green. But instead of using green, we will use blue-green and yellow-green. A Short Journey is a perfect example of how this color scheme can create one memorable website.

Using analogous colors.

This technique relays on three adjacent colors. This will make the entire website seamlessly flow from one shade to the next. Though this color scheme was frowned upon several years back, in more recent times, it seems it’s getting back in the mainstream. Basically, if you choose blue as your base color, your additional colors should be blue-violet and violet. Paypal is the perfect example with its simplistic yet elegant website.

Using tetradic colors.

This scheme relays colors with similar relationships. It usually consists of 4 colors which are two-by-two complementary to each other. For example, using red, green, blue, and orange. If you want to use only three colors, this is called Triads, and the colors should be equally distant from each other on the color wheel. The most obvious example here are the three primary colors red, blue, and green. Some of the biggest tech giants, like Google, Microsoft, and eBay, use tetradic color schemes.

Using Monochromatic colors.

Using a monochromatic scheme means choosing only one color and using its variations. This means you won’t go left or right on the color scheme but up and down. Usually, this scheme is done by using tints, shades, and tones. A gorgeous example of a website using this color scheme is WeProfit, which uses purple as its main color.

Complicated schemes are your enemy.

People tend to overcomplicate things that are meant to be simple. If your color scheme looks simplistic, that’s actually wonderful. Your website’s colors should be simplistic. Complicated color schemes are your worst enemy. They make your website tacky and distracting. Elaborate color schemes are a UX disaster. They tend to confuse the user and rarely engage with something they must work hard to understand. A great example of a terrible color scheme is the Valley Isle Aquatics website.

 This is a genuine insult to your eyes, and it might actually bring you a headache if you try to read the copy. There are so many colors that your eyes are all over the place. Not to mention the fonts and typography. 

If you want to retain your customers’ attention on what’s important – your product, copy, and CTA – your color scheme should complement your overall goal. Keeping it simple will not only make your work much easier but will also make your website a lot more user-friendly. 

Contrast before everything

Contrast is the most essential part of creating a colorful website. The contrast color will grab attention instantly. Thus you should use it accordingly. For example, using contrast colors is highly effective on CTAs when done correctly. Fantastic Services is an excellent example with its predominantly white and gray color scheme, with contrasting magenta buttons.

The main idea behind the contrasting color is to instantly draw the user’s attention to what’s important. In this case, it’s the call to action, but it can also be a sales point, benefits, or anything else you might want your customers to pay extra attention to. 

Check out our website for an even better example. We used orange, the color of enthusiasm, to highlight our main points. As our unique business proposal is our cloud-based technology, in the hero section, we highlighted it, along with our deal and the CTA button. 

Throughout our website, orange is the color that highlights our selling points – “Cloud,” “Lightning fast,” “Web security,” and so on. 

So, if you want to highlight an aspect of your website, add a contrasting color that will affect the customer emotionally and draw their attention. 

Your colors and your brand

If you already have a well-recognizable brand, it might be a good idea to stick to the color scheme that your customer associates it with. For example, UPS. 

Though the colors are in a dreadful combination – yellow and brown, the customers already recognize the brand with them, so they would expect a genuine website to have these colors. At least they had the common sense to add a third color – blue- complimentary to the yellow.  

However, if your brand is not yet highly recognizable, you might want to adjust the colors to match your website’s color scheme. That’s a must if your brand colors actually create negative associations. That should be the cornerstone behind your decision when choosing a color palette. Make sure your customers have positive associations with your preferred colors. For instance, if you are selling balloons, black is obviously not the right color. Obviously, customers won’t be as attracted to your brand as if you choose orange or yellow, typically associated with fun and warmth. 

So, do your research before you start choosing your colors. Once done, you can go ahead and make your choice. There are even some tools to help you with the latter.    

Tools to help you pick a color palette

There are a ton of free color tools to help you choose the best palette for your website. First, however, you need to choose one or two colors that truly represent your brand. After that, these tools will do the rest. 

Coolors, for example, will generate your color palette based on your chosen colors’ hex code. Don’t forget to write down and save your hex codes, though, so you can use them afterward on your designs. 

Color Safe is another nifty tool that can help you find the best color for your text. For example, adding your website’s background hex code and typography will show you all contrasting colors that will look good with the set background. This may help you narrow down your primary colors as well.   

Finally, there is Paletton. This tool will help you visualize your color palette. This allows you to experiment until you find something that you like. Give it a go and see how your chosen color will look and combine with others on your website. 

Conclusion

Choosing colors for your website is not that hard if you put a bit of work into it. However, the benefits of having a nice color scheme are way too good not to invest the time and effort into choosing the best colors for your brand and website. But, of course, having nice colors means nothing if your website is slow, often is down, or has security problems. HostArmada won’t let that happen. We offer lightning-fast, reliable, and secure web hosting to help visitors get to your brilliantly colored website as fast and as often as they want. All you need to do is check our plans and choose the one that suits your needs best. If you have trouble choosing the right one, contact our team. They will happily assist you in purchasing precisely what you need.