How many colours and fonts should a website use?

Short answer: Most good websites use two or three colours and one or two fonts. Restraint looks professional and keeps the page readable, while a mix of many colours and typefaces looks cluttered and amateur. The aim is consistency, not variety.

A simple colour rule

A reliable approach is one main colour, one supporting colour and one accent, plus neutrals. The main colour carries your brand and headers. The supporting colour handles secondary elements. The accent, used sparingly, draws the eye to the thing you most want people to click, usually a call to action.

Neutrals do the quiet work: off-whites for backgrounds, dark greys for text, light greys for borders. Pure black on pure white is harsher than most people expect, so softening both slightly usually reads better.

The mistake is spreading strong colours everywhere. When five colours all shout, nothing stands out, and your buttons lose their power. If everything is highlighted, nothing is. Reserve your boldest colour for the moments that matter.

Fonts: one or two, no more

For type, one or two font families is plenty. A common pattern is one font for headings and one for body text, chosen so they contrast clearly without clashing. Many sites do perfectly well with a single family used at different weights and sizes.

What matters more than the exact fonts is that body text is easy to read: a sensible size, generous line spacing and enough contrast against the background. Decorative or novelty fonts belong in a logo at most, never in paragraphs.

Web performance is a factor too. Loading many custom fonts slows a page down, which affects both visitors and search rankings. Fewer fonts means a faster site, which we cover in how to make my website load faster.

Consistency across the site

Colours and fonts only work when they are applied the same way everywhere. Headings should look like headings on every page. Buttons should share one style. Links should behave consistently. This quiet repetition is what makes a site feel trustworthy, even if visitors never consciously notice it.

A practical way to keep this in order:

• Pick your colours and fonts once and write them down
• Use the accent colour only for key actions
• Keep heading and body styles the same across every page
• Resist adding a new colour or font for each new section

This discipline is exactly what a defined brand gives you, which is why so many good sites start from a brand identity rather than guesswork.

Let your brand lead

Ideally your website colours and fonts come straight from your brand identity, so the site matches your logo, business cards and social profiles. When they all agree, the whole business looks more established. When they do not, it looks thrown together.

If you do not have a brand yet, that is worth sorting first or alongside the build. Our branding service defines your colours, fonts and logo so the website has a clear foundation, and our print service keeps your offline materials consistent with it. There is also a logo and brand identity add-on from £60 on our web builds. For more on the order of things, see do I need a brand identity before a website.

BuiltWeb sites are one-off from £300 and you own them outright. See what is included on our packages page.

Want a site that looks like one confident business, not five? Get a clear price and we will get the colours and type right.