How to choose a colour palette for your therapy practice
Start with how you want someone to feel in the first few seconds on your site, not with a favourite colour. Someone arriving after a difficult week needs to feel that they can slow down. That usually means muted tones, plenty of light background, and one confident colour doing the work of guiding them to the next step.
- —Background and surface carry most of the page. Keep them light and slightly warm — off-white reads as calmer than pure white.
- —Your primary colour is for buttons, links and headings. It needs strong contrast against the background.
- —The accent is seasoning: highlights, icons, small details. If it covers more than about a tenth of the page it stops being an accent.
- —Text should be a very dark tint of your palette rather than pure black. It's softer on the eye and still passes contrast easily.
Using the 60–30–10 rule
A simple way to keep a palette balanced: roughly 60% background, 30% surface and text, 10% primary and accent. On a therapy website that means mostly calm space, with colour reserved for the things you want people to notice — your booking button above all.
Why contrast matters more than the colours themselves
Low-contrast pale grey text on a cream background is one of the most common problems we see on therapist websites. It looks soft in a design mock-up and becomes hard to read on a phone in daylight — and harder still for anyone with low vision or who is reading while distressed. Every palette here has been checked so that body text and buttons meet WCAG AA.
Next steps
Pair your palette with type from our font pairings for therapists, then record both in a style guide so everything stays consistent. Our guide to the best colours for therapist websites goes deeper on colour psychology, and if you'd like a palette made for your practice specifically, that's part of our brand identity work.