Red or orange article links instead of blue: about -10% engagement
Commentary byLiftArchiveOur analysis, not theirsEncyclopaedia Britannica tested red and orange in-line article links against standard blue, and the other colours cut link engagement by about 10% on average.
Britannica's own team ran the test on a set of articles, published as a VWO case study.
Blue stayed, and the team made sure no plain text was blue.
- Link engagement: red and orange links lowered engagement by about 10% on average. This is a loss for the variants.
- Britannica kept blue for all links. It also removed blue from any text that wasn't a link.
The change
Only the colour of in-line article links changes
Simplified mockup drawn by LiftArchive from the shared screenshots.
Control
Article pages with in-line links shown in blue.
Variant
The same articles with in-line links in red or orange. The team ran the test on a selected set of articles.
Why it likely lost
Our reading of the result, not the practitioner's claim.
- Blue is the colour most people expect for a link. Other colours make people stop and wonder whether text is clickable.
- Session recordings showed visitors clicking blue words that were not links. That suggests the colour strongly signals 'clickable' to this audience.
- Red and orange can read as warnings or emphasis rather than links.
Caveats: The metric was link engagement on content pages, not subscriptions. Sample size and duration were not shared.
Who ran it
Encyclopaedia Britannica ran this test and published the results (VWO case study). The numbers are theirs; the summary and commentary on this page are ours.
Read the original case study on Encyclopaedia Britannica →
How to run this test on your site
- Hypothesis
- If we change in-line link colour from blue to a brand colour, then link clicks will hold or rise, because the colour stands out more.
- Primary metric
- Clicks on in-line links per article view
- Guardrails
- Pages per session
- Bounce rate
- Subscription or sign-up clicks
- Who should test it
- Content-heavy SaaS sites, help centres and publishers that rely on internal links. Expect blue to be hard to beat; skip this if links are a minor part of your pages.
Questions
Should links be blue?
In Britannica's test, blue links beat red and orange by about 10% in engagement on average. Blue remains a safe default.
Is it a problem if non-link text is blue?
It can be. Britannica saw visitors clicking blue words that weren't links, so the team stopped using blue for plain text.