# Red or orange article links instead of blue: about -10% engagement

- Outcome: Lost
- Page type: Other (SaaS)
- Elements: Link color
- Test run by: [Encyclopaedia Britannica](https://liftarchive.com/practitioners/encyclopaedia-britannica/)
- Commentary by: LiftArchive (our analysis, not theirs)
- Original source: https://wingify.com/success-stories/britannica/
- Page: https://liftarchive.com/test/britannica-inline-link-colour/

Encyclopaedia 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.

## Result

**about -10% engagement**

- 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.

## 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)

- 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.

## How to run this test

- 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
- Guardrail: Pages per session
- Guardrail: Bounce rate
- Guardrail: 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.

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Credit: Encyclopaedia Britannica ran this test and owns the result. Summary and commentary by LiftArchive (https://liftarchive.com/test/britannica-inline-link-colour/).
Usage: Free to use, quote and build on, with credit and a link: name the practitioner or organization that ran the test and link to its LiftArchive page. The results belong to the practitioners who ran and shared them; the summaries and commentary are LiftArchive's.