Colour for Accessibility, Branding & WCAG: Getting this wrong can tank your website.

So your CEO likes yellow text on a white background: the wider internet does not.

Let’s talk about colour and how letting personal preferences influence when choosing colours for your website (and wider branding) can cause issues for your SEO and, more importantly, make your website unusable for some people.

It’s not your favourite colour or that weird one your branding agency insists is “vibrant yet trustworthy,” but how can colour, used badly, quietly wreck your website?

If you’re developing a WordPress site (or getting someone to do it for you), colour is not just a design decision. It’s a usability, accessibility, and SEO decision too. Get it wrong, and you’ll end up with a site that looks great on a PDF and fails when a real user tries to read it.

Colour is Not Just Pretty.

Colour theory isn’t just something for artists and design nerds. It’s psychology, hierarchy, and clarity all wrapped into one. On websites, colour communicates more than your copy does – faster and often louder.

Red can trigger urgency. Blue builds trust. Yellow, when used right, grabs attention. But shove them together without thought and you’ve got a migraine, not a message.

Even worse, many brands pick colour schemes based entirely on their logo or printed materials. That might be fine for packaging or social media, but websites aren’t static. They are used, clicked, read, and navigated. Accessibility isn’t a nice-to-have – it’s a requirement.

Accessibility: Where Most Brands Fall Flat.

If your brand colours don’t meet WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) contrast levels, you immediately lock out a significant portion of your audience.

That might be people with visual impairments. But it might also be someone on a phone outdoors trying to read light grey text on a white background.

This is a massive issue in WordPress development. As a developer, I build themes and templates that work – but they only work as far as the brand colours allow.

I’ve had to push back on brand teams who insist on using pastel text on pastel backgrounds. You can either have an accessible design or stick rigidly to your brand palette – you can’t always have both.

WCAG 3: It’s Getting Stricter.

You might have passed WCAG 2.1 back when your site launched. Great. But WCAG 3 is coming and it’s going to be tougher. Colour contrast, cognitive load, and readability are all under tighter focus. This isn’t a trend. This is the new standard.

If your WordPress site is built without accessibility in mind, you’ll rebuild it sooner than you think.

What I Tell Clients: Your Brand Isn’t Sacred Online.

I’ve worked on branding for over two decades. I get it – you want your colours to look great. But if your brand palette doesn’t work digitally, you need to rethink it, not just try to force it onto your website.

I’ve had to adjust brand colours slightly – sometimes only by a few per cent – to get them compliant. You can still stay on-brand, but it has to be readable, functional, and usable.

Your brand is what people experience, not just what they see.

Developers Aren’t Magicians.

No matter how good your WordPress developer is, they can’t fix accessibility issues caused by poor colour choices without breaking your brand guidelines – unless you let them. The best projects are the ones where brand and development work together, with accessibility baked in from day one.

If you give your developer brand guidelines with colours that fail accessibility checks, you’ve already created technical debt.

How to Fix It.

• Audit your brand colours: Use contrast checkers to ensure your palette meets at least AA standards (AAA, if possible).
• Adapt for web: You might need web-safe versions of your print colours.
• Think in states: It’s not just about static elements – hover, focus, and active states all need attention.
• Talk to your developer: Seriously. Don’t just hand over your brand book and disappear.
• Start with UX, not visuals: Determine how users will use the site before deciding how it should look.
• Use a tool like Coloors to research palettes and check accessibility.

Colour is one of the easiest ways to screw up your website – especially in WordPress, where theme flexibility is only helpful if your brand allows for it. If your colours don’t work online, your site won’t either.