Best Background Color for Website

It is not like designers choose random colors when they design something. They ponder over various aspects and come up with a color scheme before they start working on the design.

There is a meaning for each color and designers choose particular colors to communicate something with the users.

You might have already noticed that certain colors are associated with certain ideas. Red associated with passion, love and violence while white associated with peace and cleanness.  These conventions are partly based on old practices or psychological association of colors with particular moods.

While choosing the background color for your website, you can’t think of your favorite color is blue; so you would choose blue as the background color of your website.

It is not the right way. You are not building the site for you. It is for your prospective customers. You need to tell your website visitors that you are the best. Researchers indicate that color plays a major role in the decision of buyers while purchasing products.

Color has a huge impact on the way people perceive things and ideas and therefore the color based on what industry or business area. Here is a list of common background colors and details of who use those colors.

Achromatic Colors

Achromatic colors are white, black and different shades of gray.  These colors don’t have hue in them and so most of the colors would match against any colors.

There are websites that use only achromatic colors. Nike, Jaguar and Shakira.com are a few famous website using only achromatic colors on their website; the images are an exception.

White

You may have noticed that most of the famous websites including Google, YouTube, Yahoo and websites in the publishing industry use white as their background color. White is clean and it helps the designers to build neat and tidy designs. Moreover, the white background color would match perfectly with most other colors. Therefore, a white background is perfect for most industries.

Information-rich websites use white as the background color because the users are interested in the content and nothing should distract the users from the content. That is why you can’t see many websites using bright hues as a dominant color in e-commerce or informatory blogs. White background color makes the content focused and increase the visibility and readability of the content.

Websites of Hospitals and news publications and informatory websites etc. are recommended to use only white color for their website.

Black

Black can be used for mysterious websites or for brands with values of power or elegance. Black also symbolizes elegance, power and value. Car makers like Mercedes Benz, Rolls Royce and Jaguar use black as the background and dominant color on their websites and it perfectly works for them because it represents the wild of the car they make.

However, pure black is not recommended in design. You should use 85 – 95% gray instead of black. You should avoid pure black even for the texts.

Blue

Most of the companies including Facebook and Dell use blue in their website as a dominant color. This color symbolizes trust, safety and experience. The blue color can be used by companies in most industries in the world.

Moreover, blue is the color of water and sky. Therefore, blue is the best option for businesses associated with water or sea. For example, blue would be great for swimming pool builders and water tourism companies.

You can also use blue as foreground color against white backgrounds.

Most of the universities and colleges use navy blue as a prominent color on their website. This color stands for intelligence and experience too. These are two values educational institution wants to impart to its ‘customers’. The common way of using navy blue in such website is navy blue as the background color for the body and use white color for the wrapper area.

Red

Red is associated with energy and passion. The brand color of Coco-Cola Company is red and they use the red color as the background color on their website. This color symbolizes energy and passion which are two brand values of Coco-Cola.

Orange

Most of the restaurant and fast food chains all over the world use orange or its small variants as the main color. This has to do with the effect of orange color on the psyche and body of the human beings. Seeing orange can create appetite and impulse which is good for restaurants.

Although not as the background color, Amazon uses orange in their color scheme. This is to create the impulse on the visitors to buy something from their website. Orange color attracts consumers and therefore it is good for them.

Pink

Pink is usually associated with girls and romance. Recently, organizations related to cancer disease use pink color on their websites. The website of The Cancer Fighters is a famous website using pink as a background color. Pink is also used as an accent color on the wedding websites, dating websites and e-commerce websites.

Purple

Purple has a royal elegance and it is used in the websites offering luxury services or high-quality products. This color is also good for websites selling antique products.

Interior designing companies, dressmakers and decoration artists and other creative artists can use purple as a background color on their website.

Green

Green is the color of nature and it stands for health, wealth and tranquility. It also represents freshness. That is why business selling natural products or fresh products use green as a dominant color in their websites.

Organization and companies use green to convey the message of eco-friendliness and environment protection. Green can be the best color for companies focusing on green energy or selling eco-friendly products.

Travel and hospitality websites also use green on their websites if nature is a theme on their website. You can see most of the tourist companies in Sri Lanka and Kerala use green in their website because it is associated with the theme tourism they promote.

Another industry where green is used as a dominant color is natural medicine. Most of the Ayurveda hospital and resorts offering natural therapy use green on their website. This conveys the natural treatment, warmth of nature and eco-friendliness.

Yellow

Yellow stands for youthfulness and energy. It represents progress and growth.

When you think about construction, the first color that might come to your mind might be yellow because of the yellow helmets are worn by people construction area. Therefore, yellow is immediately associated with construction and that is why most of the construction companies use yellow as the background color or accent color on their website.

Coffee Brown

This color would be great for coffee café or similar type restaurants because it is related to what the business does.

Brand Color

There are brands associated with certain colors. The best example for this would be Coco-Cola. This brand is associated with red because they choose red as their brand color and used it boldly in their products and promotional materials. You can see the bold use of red color on their website.

Red is their brand color and they use it as the dominant color on the website because they want to reinforce the brand identity.

There is nothing wrong to use bold colors as your background if it is branding. However, if you think the color of your brand is too intense to be used as a background color on your website, you can choose a variation of it. You can use online color pickers and color wheels which available on the web to choose the best color.

Avoid Bright and Saturated Color

It is not recommended to use bright, shiny or fully saturated colors as background colors. That is considered bad UI practice.

However, recently some well-known web designers have gone bold and used bright and vibrant colors on their website, and it seems like it is becoming a trend now.

Best designers would take precautions to reduce the readability issues by selecting complementary colors intelligently. It is important to choose the right colors for texts and other elements if your go for saturated colors for you background.

Colors Based on Industry

As we mentioned above, certain colors are associated with the certain industry. A color that is against the values and ideas of the industry would definitely drive the visitor away from your website.

For example, can you imagine a website of a hospital in dark background? That would be weird. Most of us already know what color matches what industry and so you have to consider the nature of business while you choose the color.

Website Color Schemes

After determining the background color, you need to choose other colors for the website. This is known as the color scheme. In a color scheme for a website, 3 colors are recommended. You can use one more if you want, but don’t use more than 4.

You can use website color pickers to find the best color scheme for your website based on color theory. There are many free website color palette generator and Adobe Color is one of the popular tools for online. This tool would help you to find different colors that go well together with the first main color you choose.

You need to choose colors that give better contrast between the content and background. If readers find it difficult to read the content on your website, they would leave your website with a bad impression and they are never likely to visit your website again. You should use best background colors for eyes to not distract the attention or focus of the visitors.