Website Colour Palettes to Increase Conversions

When it comes to designing a website you need to consider various things like choosing a hosting plan, settling on a theme, selecting the graphics and so on. It can be easy to forget that the most basic elements such as the colour scheme of the website play an essential role in the success of your site.

For most businesses, conversions are the single most significant indicators that their website is performing well, and the colour scheme plays a crucial role. How? Let’s get to know that.

Colour psychology plays a dominant role in marketing your business. Colours are used to capture the attention of customers and improve the user experience. In online marketing, different colours play a huge role in determining whether the visitor will enjoy their experience while browsing or will leave quickly without making a purchase. 

What Exactly is Colour Psychology?

Colour psychology is the study of tones as a determinant of human behaviour. Simply put, it is how colours affect people and the way they behave. Different colours inspire different emotions, feelings and responses in people, meaning that what affects one person may not change the rest in the same way. For instance, some will associate red colour with passion while others will attribute it more to anger. While I won’t dig into how the colours influence us all, but here is a brief overview of the psychological properties of the dominant colours used in web designing.

The Meaning of Colours

Red – The colour red is associated with energy, excitement, passion and danger and it also conveys a sense of urgency. If your goal is to promote a clearance sale, using red in advertisements or graphics will immediately draw attention. This makes the viewer eager to complete the interaction and instil the fear of missing out. The colour red is incredibly stimulating making it highly popular in sales material. You can use red to grab the attention of the reader’s eye and lighten the mood with supporting copy and imagery.

Orange – This colour is associated with happiness and cheer and is universally seen as a fun colour. Using orange colour in your branding is a great way to show you don’t take yourself too seriously and it works well in an accent in a more neutral palette to catch the reader’s eye in ads and other marketing materials.

Yellow – The colour of sunshine, happiness and joy helps you make your readers feel optimistic and warm. Yellow is often seen in parenting, wellness and travel websites. Yellow can be used to make your site and your brand feel approachable, welcoming and friendly. However, don’t use too much of it as it can be quite overwhelming. Yellow accents work well with neutral palettes, livening up content without impacting the professional look and feel.

Green – The colour green is associated with the environment and has a calming effect. Websites that advocate environmental causes or sell outdoor products often have a green colour theme. It is a great way to add a peaceful vibe.

Blue – The most versatile and universally liked is the colour blue. It inspires the feelings of trust making it quite popular in the business world, especially the financial sector. Blue offers a soothing and relaxing vibe and is often used in web design palettes and logos for industries that require a high level of trusts such as the insurance, banking and cybersecurity. Soft blues will relax your audience and vivid blues provide an air of credibility. Relaxation and confidence will drive website conversions.

Purple – The colour of royalty, wealth and power is commonly used for marketing beauty products. However, it also works well for healthcare, technology and finance brands but is not as attractive for energy or agricultural brands. 

Pink – The colour pink represents femininity and has been used in female-centric branding. If your website caters to a young, female audience, consider using pink. However, different shades of pink can also be used to create a more youthful vibe that appeals just as strongly to men. 

Black – Black colour is associated with darkness and death in many cultures, but it has earned a reputation for elegance, glamour and sleekness in the digital marketing world. Black is the colour of power and commonly used to promote luxury products. Use black to emphasise the unique, elite sense of your brand making visitors want to be a part of that exclusive club.

White – White represents innocence, virtue and purity and is also closely associated with hygiene and cleanliness which explains its extensive use in the healthcare industry. Using white in your website palette will let content stand out and foster feelings of honesty that will result in conversions.

Grey – Grey is mature, authoritative and shows people you mean business. If you’ve got a more serious brand, then grey is a great colour choice. 

Anything visual your company produces needs to have an appropriate colour scheme. The right colour can lead to conversions, while the wrong can leave the customers with a negative impression of your company. Let’s take a look at something as simple as gender as it relates to favourite colours.

Colours women love are blue, purple and green while they hate orange, brown and grey. Men love blue, green and black while they hate brown, orange and purple. 

Choosing the Right Colour Scheme for your Website

Now that I have worked out on the story behind colours and why we are influenced differently and show unique behaviour. It’s time that we put it into practice. Settling in on right colour scheme doesn’t have to be a complicated process, all it takes is a little research, the right tools and a team of professional web designers and developers from a reputed firm, visit here to hire the designers and developers. The following steps will help you choose the right colour scheme for your website.  

Emotions

What emotions do you want to trigger with your website? Consider the personality of your audience and how you connect with them. If your site is about online security, privacy safety or cryptocurrency development, you might want to consider choosing blue as your main colour with little purple and pink just like the Blockchain Australia website. Whereas, if you have a food or outdoor activities website, a green colour would be a perfect choice as it’s the colour of nature.

Age

A research was conducted where age groups filtered favourite and least favourite colours. The study states that blue is the most favoured colour choice for most of the people because it has a calming and relaxing effect. Yellow is most liked by children but begins to drop away as they become adults. As people mature there comes a greater liking for hues of shorter wavelength (blue, green, purple) than for the tones for longer wavelength (red, orange and yellow). So if you are selling products for kids like toys and clothing longer wavelength colour scheme is the perfect choice.

Personal Preference

When writing new content for your website, you research what users are interested in and what would appeal to them. Same goes for choosing the colour scheme of your site, don’t let the personal preference hinder the decision-making process. You may not like a particular colour, but if your audience loves that colour, you have to use it. Be aware that your personal colour preference will negatively affect your website’s growth and conversion.

Research your Competitors

Whenever designing a website, it is good if you have a quick look at the competitors in your niche. Look at what they are doing and how many colours are they using on their website. This will give you an insight of what audience like and are most attracted to. Once you have conducted the research, you can either create a website with a similar colour pattern or implement the complete opposite colour pallet to create a unique look.

Colour Distribution

Before you continue to design a website, you should have decided on the primary colour of your blog. I recommend you choose two other colours in addition to the primary colour. A very common formula to follow is 60-30-10 colour distribution where the primary colour would cover about 60% of the website followed by two other shades covering 30% and 10% respectively.

Multiple Colour Scheme Options

Selecting one colour scheme for your website with three colours might not be the best solution. You should create a few colour schemes tailored to your site and compare them with each other and then pick the one that you truly believe will work best.

These are some of the points that will help you choose the perfect colour scheme for your website and increase conversions.

Conclusion

Colours may not seem that important at first glance, but they matter. They make a difference between whether the visitors will make a purchase or leave without buying. However, saying one colour converts better than the other is merely stupid. There is no universal best colour. What works for one website may or may not work for another. Visual hierarchy and making your call to actions stand out matters the most.