Are The Colours of Your Hyperlinks Killing Your Website?

When designing a website, one aspect to consider is what colour hyperlinks to display on the website. It sounds like a trivial choice, with a few potential strategies to choose, such as…

• Choice A – Choose links which blend into your website’s colour theme.
• Choice B – Make them really stand out by choosing a colour that contrasts with the colour scheme.
• Choice C – Go for the default blue links.

As Chris Denny over at LeadOptimize suggests, it isn’t as trivial a decision as it sounds, as the choice of colour can significantly impact conversion rates. Chris uses one of his clients as an example – initially the client was using hyperlinks that blended nicely into the theme of the website, however they were suffering from a very low conversion rate. By changing the colour of the links to make them stand out, this benefited the conversion rate by an enormous amount.

This strategy of making links stand out won’t necessarily be a ‘quick fix’ for every website, but it definitely emphasises the importance of aspects that would often be overlooked. Before making any permanent changes, it might be worth trying one colour of links for a week and then change the colour of the links for the second week and compare the conversion rates between the two. Don’t change the colours too frequently however, or your users will start to get a bit disoriented by the lack of consistency!

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Tags: Hyperlink colours, increase conversions, choosing colours