Whether you’re marketing offline or online it’s all about design. Design is what makes people love or hate your product and one major element in design is color. Designers are no longer limited to primary or muted colors. Website backgrounds today can be any shade of the rainbow. Many companies spend thousands of dollars to research what color scheme would work best for their website.
Google, the internet’s top visited website, chose a clean white background for its well known search engine. So does Google indeed have it right? Is a white background most effective in the online world or do people prefer a bit more color? Is it just a matter of taste or do websites with certain background colors earn more? In its effort to supply the online world with valuable information, Infolinks analyzed their networks’ top earning websites by dividing them according to background color.
Among the top 100 Infolinks earning websites 55% have a white background, followed by 15% blue and 13% black. Among the top 500 Infolinks websites the results were quite different, only 29% have a white background, 23% have a blue background and 21% have black.
Among the top 500 earning websites the background color division is relatively equal, while among the top 100 earning websites the white background clearly dominates.
The fact that websites with white backgrounds are simply more common could very well be the reason why they are the top earners, but if one looks deeper it could be attributed to our preference to read black on white, or merely because a white background appears to be more professional.
Another possible reason is the fact that Google did indeed set the tone. It’s what users have come to know and love. When Google added a background image to its homepage by default, there was uproar in the online world. The blogosphere blew up with complaints and demands for the traditional background to be reinstated.
Regardless of what the reason is, websites with a white background appear to be more effective. The Infolinks research shows that among the top earning websites white backgrounds remain supreme. Therefore, it seems that white websites do in fact earn more. So whether you are starting to design your website or are in the midst of a redesign consider keeping things simple. A clean look and feel featuring a white background might just be the right choice.
The Infolinks Metrics Center provides top notch Internet studies and industry insight. Our research team analyzes data from the Infolinks network, bringing you the scoop on the latest trends in the online world.