The fonts and colours you choose for your website do more than make it look nice — they create a mood, tell your brand story, and help visitors instantly recognise your business.
The right combination will make your site professional, cohesive, and easy to read. The wrong one? Well, let’s just say it can make even the best content look messy.
Here’s a beginner-friendly guide to choosing fonts and colours that work beautifully together.
1. Start with your ‘brand personality’
Before you open a colour picker or browse a font library, think about your brand’s personality. Are you modern and bold? Calm and professional? Playful and creative?
Your design choices should reflect that. For example:
- Modern brands often use clean sans-serif fonts and high-contrast colours.
- Elegant brands lean towards serif fonts and muted, sophisticated tones.
- Playful brands might embrace fun display fonts and bright, energetic colours.
2. Choose two complementary fonts
Too many fonts can make a site look chaotic. A safe rule is to pick two:
- Heading font: something distinctive to draw attention.
- Body font: something simple and easy to read.
Pair a bold sans-serif heading with a clean serif (the curly bits!) body font, or vice versa. Test them together on your site to make sure they complement each other.
Google Fonts is a great place to start. Google fonts are free, good quality and are built into many WordPress themes (like Astra, that I use in all my projects and highly recommend) for quicker page loading.
Here’s the Google Fonts home page: https://fonts.google.com/
It gives you a great range of intuitive prompts to point you towards the fonts that might suit you best. Here’s just a few of the prompts.
And, for you super-busy folk, find some expertly-curated Google font pairs here https://fontpair.co/ here https://www.leadpages.com/blog/best-google-fonts and here https://www.creatopy.com/blog/google-font-pairings/ or maybe search “Best Google font combinations”.
3. Select a simple colour palette
A strong website colour scheme usually includes:
- Primary colour: the main brand colour for buttons, highlights, and key sections.
- Secondary colour: to balance and complement the primary.
- Neutral colours: for backgrounds and text (often shades of grey, white, or black).
Use tools like Coolors or Adobe Color to create harmonious palettes. In the WordPress Astra theme, you can set these colours globally so they’re consistent across every page.
4. Think about accessibility
Your fonts and colours should look great for everyone. Check that your text colour contrasts well with its background — dark grey text on white is often easier on the eyes than pure black. The free WebAIM Contrast Checker can help.
5. Keep it consistent
Once you’ve chosen your fonts and colours, stick with them. Consistency builds recognition and trust. In WordPress with the Astra theme, save your font and colour settings in the Customiser so every new page matches your brand style.
Final tip: If in doubt, keep it simple. Minimal, well-chosen fonts and a clean colour palette will almost always look more professional than a busy mix of styles.