Choosing Colours for a Business Website: What the Research Says

Pick three colours at most, make the one for your buttons stand out, and check it reads well for everyone. Blue is the safest trust signal, but the colour that fits your business matters more than the exact shade you choose — and contrast matters more than either.

That is the short version. Colour is one of the highest-leverage decisions on a business website: by some industry estimates, 62–90% of an initial product assessment may be influenced by colour (CCICOLOR, cited in Singh, Management Decision, 2006 — an industry figure, not a controlled experiment). Worth getting right. Here is how we think about it.

Does colour really affect trust?

It helps, but "fit" beats hue. The classic study on this — Labrecque & Milne, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (2012) — found that the link between a brand and its colour hinges on perceived appropriateness: whether the colour suits what you actually sell. A colour that fits your business will outperform a "trustworthy" colour that feels wrong on you.

Blue is the safest default. It is the most widely preferred colour across genders and age groups (Hallock, University of Washington survey), which is why banks, insurers and enterprise software lean on it. But it is a starting point, not a rule. If every competitor in your field already uses blue, a well-chosen non-blue palette can make you more memorable — the Von Restorff effect shows that things which stand out get remembered.

Colour also signals where you sit in the market. Research from Nielsen Norman Group (NNGroup) found that subdued, darker palettes read as premium and high-service, while bright, saturated ones read as budget and accessible — and that an overly colourful look can come across as "discount" in a professional context. Neither is wrong; they just say different things.

How many colours should a website use?

Three, plus neutrals. NNGroup recommends the 60-30-10 rule: one dominant colour across roughly 60% of the page, a secondary colour for about 30%, and an accent for the remaining 10% — buttons, links, the things you want clicked.

On top of those three you need a small set of greys (background, borders, muted text, body, headings) and four "state" colours for errors, success, warnings and information. That is it.

A complete business palette is usually 11–13 colour tokens in total. More than 13 is a sign you are building a design system, not a website.

This is exactly the kind of constraint we design around. A tight palette is easier to read, easier to keep consistent, and far easier to maintain than a page using fifteen shades that nobody can keep straight.

Should the accent colour match the brand colour?

No — and this trips a lot of people up. The colour you want people to act on should contrast with everything around it, not blend in. The research favours an analogous base (colours near each other) with a highly contrasting accent for calls to action (extrapolated from Schloss & Palmer, Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 2011). The famous HubSpot test where a red button beat a green one by 21% (2011) is widely read as a contrast effect — the red stood out against a green-heavy page — rather than anything magic about red itself.

So your "Book a call" button should be the loudest thing on the screen. If it is the same colour as your header, it disappears.

What about contrast and readability?

This is where colour stops being taste and becomes accessibility. The WCAG 2.2 standard sets minimum contrast ratios so text stays legible: 4.5:1 for normal body text and 3:1 for large headings against their background (WebAIM, Contrast and Color Accessibility). The lightest grey that still passes for body text on white is roughly #767676 — anything paler fails. We treat these ratios as a build rule, not a nice-to-have.

Colour blindness is the other thing to design for. Around 8% of men of Caucasian descent have red-green colour vision deficiency (lower in other groups; Colour Blind Awareness). That rules out a few common mistakes:

• Red and green next to each other merge into a muddy yellow-brown for those 8%.
• Never rely on colour alone to carry meaning (WCAG 1.4.1) — add an icon, a label or an underline. Keep your links underlined.
• A good test: if a design still works in greyscale, it works for colour-blind users too. Blue is, again, the safe primary here — it is untouched by the most common deficiency.

Do we need a dark mode?

Usually not, and the evidence is clearer than most people expect. Light mode measurably outperforms dark mode for reading — better visual acuity, especially for small text and long content, even at night (Piepenbrock et al., 2013; Dobres et al., 2017, both via NNGroup). Users tend to think dark mode helps more than it actually does.

And they do not miss it. In an NNGroup survey (n=115), preference split roughly into thirds — dark, light, mixed — but people set dark mode at the operating-system level, barely notice when a site does not offer it, and never abandon a site over it. The main exception is products aimed at developers, where dark is the native expectation. For nearly every other business — finance, legal, healthcare, e-commerce, consulting — light is the right default.

Does culture change which colours work?

Yes, if you sell internationally. Colour meanings shift across markets: red signals luck and prosperity in China but danger in the West; white means purity in much of the West but mourning in parts of East Asia (Aslam, Journal of Marketing Communications, 2006). Blue travels best — it reads as trustworthy almost everywhere. For East Asian markets, a warm off-white background tends to sit better than stark pure white.

FAQ

What is the best colour for a business website?

Blue is the safest single choice — it is the most widely preferred colour and reads as trustworthy across cultures (Hallock survey). But a colour that genuinely fits your business and stands out from competitors can do better. Fit and contrast matter more than the specific hue (Labrecque & Milne, 2012).

How many colours should a website have?

Three main colours, following the 60-30-10 rule (one dominant, one secondary, one accent), plus a few neutral greys and four state colours — about 11–13 in total (NNGroup). More than that usually hurts clarity.

What colour should a call-to-action button be?

Whatever contrasts most with the rest of the page, so it draws the eye. Contrast, not a specific colour, is what makes buttons get clicked (the much-cited HubSpot button test, 2011, is best read as a contrast effect).

Do I need a dark mode?

Most businesses do not. Light mode reads better, and users rarely notice or miss dark mode when it is absent (NNGroup). Developer-focused products are the main exception.

We build fast, conversion-tuned websites to exactly this research — tight palettes, contrast that passes accessibility standards, and an accent colour that actually gets clicked. If you would like a site designed around the numbers rather than guesswork, book a call and we will walk you through it.