How Colours Influence Website User's Behaviour

Colour can encourage brand loyalty, an emotional response, and even drive action.  Colour can be used in design to encourage a call to action to be completed.  Knowing your target audience can influence the colour palette that should be used to get the result that you want.

We tend to recognise the colour of a brand without needing any other information. It can prompt us to purchase when presented with competing items on a supermarket shelf.  Who doesn’t immediately think of Cadbury when they see purple, or Coca-Cola when they see red?  Consistency in the use of colour throughout your business will promote brand recognition and encourage loyalty.

Having an understanding of what emotional response a colour evokes is important when starting to look at what colour palette to use on your website:

Blue – calm, stable, and trustworthy

Red – fast, motivating, and thrilling

Yellow – happy, optimistic, and engaging

Orange – fun, active, and lively

Pink – light, sensitive, and caring

Purple – creative, mystery, and luxury

Green – healthy, sustainable, and organic

Brown – robust, durable, and simple

Black – elegant, powerful, and strong

White – pure, minimalist, and clean

Grey and silver – practical, neutral, technological

Colours can mean different things to different groups of customers. For example, purple is more attractive to women, and can even have a detrimental impact on men.  Pink gives a different response in different countries.

Your target market should influence the colours you use.

White space allows us to process information more clearly, and quickly. White is a very important colour in web design to give the user the ability to “see” the information you are sharing. White improves readability.

Black and white images tend to be more memorable than coloured images.

The colour of the font needs to have a contrast to the background colour to make it easier to read. Some contrasts, such as black text on a white background, are difficult to read and should be avoided.

Your website should have a colour palette of three or four colours. This will give the design the ability to make content attractive, draw attention to key points, and be memorable.

We talk about a classic 60-30-10 rule to make it comfortable to look at but gives us the behavioural response we want from the use of colours. This means you use 60% of the main colour, 30% of the secondary colour and 10% of an accent colour.

Not sure the colours on your website are quite right for your brand message and market?   We would love to help to drive conversion through the use of colour in your website design.  Give us a call and we can have a chat.

This article originally published on our Cambridge Website at www.website-design-cambridge.co.uk