The colors of the web 2026

The list is the Majestic Million, which ranks domains by how many other networks link to them. Going down it in rank order, the study opened each domain's home page through Recolor, the way anyone loads a site into the app, until 1,000 had loaded: ranks 1 to 1,506, 1,506 domains in all. The other 506 did not count; the most common reasons were these: the home page answered with an error status (170); no answer over HTTPS: no address, a refused connection, a certificate error or a timeout (144); it lands where a higher-ranked site already did (64); robots.txt keeps * or Recolor from the home page (60). The home pages that refused answered 403 most often (93 times), then 404 (20). The fetcher read each site's robots.txt first, asked for the page and the style sheets it links, and ran no scripts, so what was measured is the HTML and CSS the server sends to everyone.

Recolor's engine then read every color in that CSS, merged near-identical values, weighed each by how much of the page it covers, and grouped them into hue families, the way it does before it repaints a page. A site's main color is the family the engine ranks first. The methodology has every definition, and the fetcher's page says what it sends and how to refuse it.

Blue is the main color of 49% of the sites, more than every other hue together. Red follows with 16%, then cyan with 5.6% and green with 4.5%; no other hue has more. 3.2% of the sites have no main color at all: their pages are black, white and grey.

Blue is also the most widespread. 67% of the sites have a blue family that holds at least 5% of their color, against 31% for red and 21% for yellow. The main colors are strong ones: the median main color has an OKLCH chroma of 0.177 at a lightness of 0.55, a saturated mid-tone. What colors do most websites use? has the answer on its own page.

The median site's CSS holds 113 distinct color values; half of the sites write between 58 and 189. Most of them are shades of a few colors. Merged where they lie within 0.04 of each other in OKLab and counted only where they reach an element, the median home page uses 18 colors, 9 of them more than a grey, in 3 hue families. Greys carry 73% of the color on the median page, weighed by what each color covers. The spread is wide: 8.4% of the sites write fewer than 25 values, 4.6% write 400 or more, and the most is 1,085.

How many colors does a website use? shows the colors in use site by site, and How many colors a website palette needs what to choose for your own.

Hex is everywhere: 99.6% of the sites write at least one hex code, and hex codes are 81% of all 1,181,518 color values in the study. rgb() follows on 89% of the sites, named colors such as white on 75%, hsl() on 37%. 16% keep a color as bare numbers in a variable for rgb() or hsl() to read, as Shopify and Wix themes do.

The notations of CSS Color 4 are still rare: oklch() is on 5.9% of the sites, lab() on 1.9%, oklab() on 2.3% and color() on 1.2%. 48% of the sites write nothing but hex codes, named colors and rgb(). Newer functions spread faster than the notations: color-mix() is on 22%, relative colors on 5.6%, light-dark() on 1.8%. How many websites use OKLCH has the detail, and What OKLCH is why palette tools moved to it.

Custom properties carry much of the web's color now. 82% of the sites read at least one color through var(), and on the median site 32% of the color declarations do; across all sites it is 38%. The median site defines 47 variables that hold a color. That is the layer recoloring a site with CSS variables works on.

Tailwind CSS is the framework seen most: its variables are on 20% of the sites, 37% of them on version 4. Bootstrap's are on 13%, and WordPress's color presets on 9.6%. 58% of the sites carry none of the frameworks the study looks for.

92% of the home pages are light: the color behind the page is white or close to it. 6.6% are dark, and 1% sit between. Measured by the text instead of the canvas, 13% of the sites set most of their text on a dark ground. Chrome read every page in light mode.

A dark mode is more common in the CSS than on the page: 41% of the sites declare dark colors somewhere, under a dark theme's class or attribute (33%), in a prefers-color-scheme: dark media query (16%) or with light-dark() (1.8%). 17% set a color-scheme that includes dark, which turns the browser's own form controls and scroll bars dark as well.

On the average site, 94% of the text reaches 4.5:1 against what it sits on, 3.2% lies between 3:1 and 4.5:1, and 3.1% is under 3:1. 60% of the sites have some text that fails WCAG AA, which asks 4.5:1 for text and 3:1 for large text; 40% pass everywhere. Half of the median site's text reads at 13.8:1 or better. The study blends transparent text over its background, as a browser paints it; read as opaque, the average site's failing share would be 5.8% rather than 6%.

Black or white text on a color shows how to pick the readable text color for a background, and the contrast matrix checks every pair of a palette.

The 100 highest-ranked sites that loaded, in Majestic's order; the gaps in the ranks are the sites that did not. The main color is the family the engine ranks first, with its anchor's hex code. See its colors opens the site in Recolor, where the Site colours panel lists every color the engine found and Space repaints the page in a new palette. 62 of these 100 have a blue main color, against 49% of all 1,000 sites, and 7 have none.

• Images. Photos, logos, video and canvas keep their colors and are not read: a photo hero adds nothing.
• Scripts. With scripts off, a page that its scripts build shows only its shell, and colors a script sets are missing. A site that sends a crawler another page than a browser was measured as sent.
• One page, one width. Only the home page, at a desktop width, in light mode; hover and focus colors count at 0.2 of their weight.
• Sheets the fetcher could not get. 5.3% of the sites had at least one style sheet that did not come through, and its colors are missing.

Which sites load covers the same limits for the app.

Cite it as:

Recolor (recolor.page), "The colors of the web 2026", October 8, 2026, https://recolor.page/research/colors-of-the-web-2026/

The data is one row per domain attempted, with every measure above, the main color and the 5 heaviest colors of each site: dataset.csv and dataset.json. It is licensed CC BY 4.0: use it for anything, crediting "Recolor (recolor.page), The colors of the web 2026". The list of sites is Majestic's, licensed CC BY 3.0 with the attribution "Majestic". Every figure on this page, with its definition and the number of sites it counts, is in results.json.