To be honest, I do not know. After hours of searching online, I was unable to find any websites writing on the top 10 most popular website colours for 2016, although I did find an article by wired.com that stated that the most popular colour on the Internet in 2016 was blue.
This is quite apparent when you take a look at the top 10 most visited websites in Canada (http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/CA), about 60% of them (Facebook, Wikipedia, Reddit, Amazon, Live and Diply) use blue as their primary accent colour.
Even Google, which has a multi coloured logo, from which most people choose their primary website colour, uses blue for its search icon and links, while Yahoo uses a dark purple as its primary accent colour, which is on the blue colour spectrum.
For me, the colour that stood out most last year was dark red, unlike in 2015 which was teal. I would say that about 40% of my clients in 2016 used dark red as their primary or only accent colour on their websites. In most cases, the colour choice was dictated by their company logo. Since none were new in business, it obviously made sense to use the company colours. But when you’re new in business or if your logo is black, you have a whole colour palette to choose from.
Since I couldn’t find any websites on the top 10 most popular website colours for 2016, I decided to compile my own list from clients’ websites that I worked on last year.
My top 10 colours for websites in 2016 were:
- Dark red
Top of the list is dark red which was mainly used for header areas, footer areas, accents, menu bars, buttons, links, titles and sub-titles.
Some of the web colours used were: # 5c0105, # 960208, #76222C, #8E2438, #B1282F, #770E11, AD2F35 and #7D1E23
- Teal green
In second place is teal green. A number of my clients’ websites included teal green, which I determined to be any blue with a percentage of yellow in the mix which was also higher than the percentage of cyan. Some of the web colours for teal green were: #389980, #63C6AE, #1693A5 and #22A2AE
Teal blue
Tied in second place is teal blue. I found several clients’ websites using various hues and shades of teal blue, which I determined to be any teal with a lower percentage of yellow than magenta. Some of the web colours used for teal blue were: #0A3D5C, #223C6A, #105E8D and #30668F.
Orange
Also tied in second, was orange. Excluding my own website, I worked on several websites that include orange as either a primary accent colour or secondary accent colour. Some of the web colours for orange used were: # FD8628, #F67400, #F48C2D and #ED5100
- Tied in fifth place, were Green with #008008, #026638, and #339900, Wine (or dark pink) with # B51176, #A22575 and #AA3C7C, Lime Green with #91C348, #7DC242 and #B0D461 and Blue with #16017D, #007DC3 and #418BC2.
- Tied in ninth place are Purple with #650073 and #4B0355 and Bright Pink with #CD2A8B and #F047B1.
I could place pale pink in this list, but in most cases it was a shade of either dark or bright pink and used as a background colour not the primary accent colour. Only one website, a breast cancer website used pale pink only as it’s primary colour. I suppose I could have put all the pinks together and it would have come in second place, pushing all the other second place colours to third. In that case, my 10 most popular web colour would have been dark brown, which I saw in quite a few websites, often used as a secondary accent colour. A couple of other notable colours were yellow and gold.
I’ll be interested to see what the most popular colours that my 2017Â clients will choose for their websites.
Which colours did you see the most on websites you visited? Which of the colours here do you like the best? Or do you have your own favourite?
