Website Color Palettes for Restaurants

Choosing colors for restaurant websites might be a challenging process for anybody working in this business at times because there are several crucial variables or components to consider before making a final decision on color palettes. Aside from the restaurant brand itself, how colors impact customers' conscious and subconscious minds is a crucial factor to consider.

As a web designer or restaurant business owner, it’s also important to understand the color terminology and theory, since it will help the process of selecting the perfect color palettes for your restaurant website.

Why the Right Restaurant Website Color Palette is Important?

(5 Key Reasons)

The top visual aspects that customers appreciate on a website are color, images, and videos.

The modern web design statistics show that photographs and color were mentioned by nearly 40% of respondents, while the video was mentioned by 21%.

Based on this given data, your restaurant company should prioritize adding images and choosing a website color palette before doing anything else. The excellent selection of web color palettes would visually speak for your restaurant website's online success and presence.

Here are the 5 main reasons why choosing the right color palettes for your restaurant website is crucial:

1. The composition of the right color palettes makes it easy to remember

The first impression that sticks to your potential customers is how you beautifully craft a composition of colors in your web content layout that adds up to personal interaction between your restaurant business and your customers.

Your customers will also associate this with your restaurant brand so it will automatically help them to remember your offered menu and services.

2. It helps web visitors to navigate your web content

There’s no doubt that a good web layout always uses the right color palettes or hues so the visitors' eye-tracking or movement would easily flow from one section to another. Poorly selected color palettes make it hard for visitors who try to navigate your restaurant website content.

One example is when there’s a lack of color contrast in the search form area, it won’t be easy to find it on a web page, and as a consequence finding a specific restaurant menu will be a painful experience for a customer.

3. Build hierarchy on a web page

Color palettes contrast and weight can be used to create a hierarchy within a web page. It depends on which web elements or group of content sections deserve a level of importance, hence you can utilize color tints to differ them from their surrounded elements

It could be useful if let’s say you want to run a limited-time discount on a specific menu or highlight a new dish on the top part of your web page. Using the right color for that section or CTA (call to action) button will help a lot.

4. Provide better accessibility and UI/UX

A website must not only have a beautiful layout, but it’s also important to be accessible to everyone, especially visitors with disabilities according to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

Make sure that you use a color palette interface that meets standards either in text color contrast ratio and the button change of state, as this will help color-blind users to access your restaurant website

Website Components to Consider

What are components to consider when it comes to choosing the right color palettes for a website? This part will be better understood using case studies and reviews of some of these featured online restaurants.

• Restaurant Brand Identity

• Restaurant Targeted Consumers

Restaurant Brand Identity

It is highly suggested that you need to maintain good color consistency between your brand colors and your restaurant website color palettes because this will continuously give memorable moments of the entire user experience and how you would build strong relationships with your customers.

You can also create a sense of familiarity with your customers if you match your offsite restaurant interior color palettes with your restaurant website color palettes as one of many ways to maintain color consistency.

Color consistency to brand image also prevents customer confusion as you would often deal with your competitors' campaigns and niche businesses. Being able to be unique with your brand colors will increase the chance to win the competition.

Restaurant Targeted Consumers

• Family Restaurants

• Destination Restaurants

• Fine Dining and Cuisine Restaurants

• International Cuisine Restaurants

Family Restaurants

Jungle Cave

This kids and family restaurant website is using a jungle theme as they offer Amazon rainforest ambiance and adventure for their customers. Green and orange are the main color palettes found on the website as they help to bring out the natural vibes and resemble a tropical forest's playful mix of colors.

Mimi’s Cafe

The website color palettes for Mimi’s Cafe online restaurant are simple and casual yet welcoming to any age range visitors with a warm family atmosphere. The Stiletto Red in contrast to white provides a clear and clean color composition without overdoing it on the whole web layout.

Destination Restaurants

Wallberg

The website applies the natural color selection concept as one example of destination restaurants. The soft color pairing of blue and white on the restaurant website blends well with the situated offline restaurant that has a panoramic view of a beautiful valley.

We can see how this color palette becomes a strong memorable brand to keep their customers coming back to enjoy the landscape view as well as to enjoy their favorite menus.

Tiki Chick

This tropical theme restaurant website has perfectly presented the summer vacation vibes using its color composition. Colors that are bold but not overpowering. The soft color palettes of coral, green, and yellow are truly captivating. This is just a great example of how a restaurant website with a very unique color selection can look so catchy among the competitors.

Fine Dining and Cuisine Restaurants

HÔTEL DE VILLE

This restaurant website picks up elegant style color schemes to contrast dark marine blue as the accent color with its colorful yet subtle patterns background. The media content such as videos and menu images mostly uses dark transparent layers to add the readability of media captions.

Resident

The subdued brown with oaky undertone monochromatic color composition looks attractive for the Resident website which has a minimalistic style. These neutral colors make it easy for any type of content especially the fine cuisine dishes photos and text to stand out in the layout.

International Cuisine Restaurants

Wahaca

Serving Mexican food, this website has a trendy combination of lively vibrant colors. The composition of colors and contrast for the culinary photos as well as the web elements such as text and buttons are well thought out. As a result, the Wahaca restaurant website gives exotic summer vibes to everyone who visits it.

Red Farm

The color combination of red and wood brown is perfect for each other in this Red Farm website design, which serves Chinese food. For effective color use, the lighter brown color balances out the muted red that is mostly used for the website headings and navigation menus.

This color palette surely works well to present the casual and cool dining experience in Red Farm restaurant.

Restaurant Website Color Palettes - Best Examples

1. Color palettes and the white Space

2. High Contrast in Color Palettes

3. Limited Use of Color Palettes

1. Color palettes and the white Space

Tiong Bahru Bakery

The use of a monochromatic palette with the teal green accent on a lighter background gives the Tiong Bahru Bakery website a calming effect and a clean appearance. The web graphics are done creatively with hand-drawn details. However, there are still enough white spaces for these web elements including the bakery photos to breathe.

Federalist Pig

The color selection for the Federalist Pig restaurant website has a strong vibrant color tone. The high contrast of black color accent in several web elements creates a fun and playful feel to combine with the golden yellow.

It grabs the web visitor's attention whilst the design layout looks minimal yet displays a good amount of white spaces for the menu photos.

2. High Contrast in Color Palettes

Panera Bread

This bakery online shop has much fine selection of menu photos to display on the homepage. All of these photos marvelously work well in contrast to the dark olive green and white web background.

So it’s true that high contrast in color palette selection would help to make menu photos stand out even more.

Dasher & Crank

This cute online ice cream shop uses a combination of a bright turquoise accent for many portions of vibrant pink color on the website. It’s immediately associated with sweet flavor, dessert!

The featured photos of various colorful ice cream flavors look more delicious being wrapped up with such cute yet bold color palettes. Contrasts in color between web elements, such as text and buttons don’t clash at all.

3. Limited Use of Color Palettes

Carrotstick Cravings

As green and pink aren't exactly complementary hues, they're rarely seen together. However, this unusual pairing works because the pink color avoids a complete clash with the green by keeping them in small amounts across the website.

The menu photos pop out more with the limited use of these color palettes.

Kachina

When you land on the Kachina cantina website for the first time, you would quickly guess that it serves Mexican food as it gets inspiration from the colors of the Mexican flag. The color palette is limited to a muted red accent color that is paired with teal green and a bit of lemon color.

The series of featured eye-catching culinary photos at the slider and on the rest of the white background homepage is just easy to eye-track and well arranged. These photos look appealing and blend well with the color composition

Conclusion

It’s agreed that color brings a certain mood and affects human psychology. We might want to correlate this fact with the statistics that show how red, orange, and yellow would be perfect colors to use on restaurant websites.

However, there are still other aspects or components to consider before you decide to use these colors. It’s better to choose the color palettes wisely before you launch a restaurant website.

The use of the right restaurant color palettes will help to balance the visual elements in your website content, such as featured menu photos and other types of media content (short animation, video, and audio), menu navigation, buttons, and web typography.

Make sure that your customers would feel welcomed by the time they open your restaurant website homepage as you present them with familiar color choices that are consistent with your brand identity and your restaurant concept.

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