Dark themes, warm gradients, or clean white? We ran A/B tests across 10,000 profiles. The results will surprise you.
Color affects purchasing decisions, brand perception, and yes — click-through rates on link-in-bio pages. We ran a six-week experiment across 10,000 profiles to find out which color palettes actually perform, controlling for follower count, content type, and posting frequency.
The experiment
We randomly assigned profiles to one of four theme categories: dark neutral, dark colorful, light neutral, and light colorful. We then tracked click-through rate (unique link clicks / profile visits) over six weeks, with weekly randomization to avoid day-of-week effects.
Results by category
- Dark neutral (Noir, Obsidian, Void): avg CTR 18.3% — highest overall
- Dark colorful (Cosmic, Electric, Galaxy): avg CTR 16.7%
- Light neutral (Clean White, Soft Gray, Paper): avg CTR 14.1%
- Light colorful (Candy, Blossom, Lavender): avg CTR 13.8%
"We expected colorful themes to win — they're more 'engaging' by conventional wisdom. The data said otherwise. Dark neutral themes win because they reduce visual noise and make link buttons the focal point."
— Jade Torres
The exception: mobile vs desktop
On desktop (less than 15% of traffic for most creators), light themes perform slightly better. On mobile — where 85%+ of bio link traffic comes from — dark themes win by a significant margin. The likely reason: OLED screens on most modern phones make dark backgrounds look sharper and more premium.
The single highest-performing theme in our dataset was Noir. If you want to maximize click rate without overthinking it, start there.
Switch to a higher-converting theme in seconds.
Browse templates →Jade Torres
Creator economy researcher and former talent manager. Writes about the business side of content creation.