I have no idea what site you’ve set as your homepage, but I’m willing to make you a bet: Whatever the site, whoever you are, the color blue is present.
Recently, the designer Paul Hebert began tracking the color palettes of the world’s largest websites, and that – of all things – was the first trend observed. On the world’s 10 most popular websites, shades of blue and turquoise outnumber other colors by a factor of two.
It’s a small sample size, of course – there are, as of this writing, an estimated 4.7 billion pages on the internet – but it was enough to prompt Wired to name blue the web’s “most popular color,” and it’s validated an age-old design observation.
Blue is the color of Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Microsoft, whitehouse.gov, WordPress and Pandora . . . among others.
But . . . why? Anecdotally, Mark Zuckerberg has said Facebook is blue because he’s red-green colorblind, and Google has said the color clicked best in rigorous A/B tests.
But the underlying reason may be that design, like art, imitates life – and in life, we like the color blue best. Repeat global surveys have found that blue is the most-preferred color among both men and women, more or less regardless of country. In labs and A/B tests alike, subjects associate the color with trustworthiness and dependability – which, may explain why blue is a fixture in many website’s “log-in” and “buy” buttons.
Washington Post