From time to time, we update the Ancestry website to give you the best possible experience. We’ve recently made changes to the look and feel of the site to improve consistency, improve accessibility, and boost legibility. These changes are intended to help make the Ancestry website easier for all people to use.

This visual refresh is based on extensive interviews, testing with users, and community feedback. To help us improve the look, share your feedback.

What’s new

Logged in pages on the Ancestry site have the following updates:

Colors: Warmer, softer tones, and improved contrast ratios for legibility and accessibility
Fonts: New typefaces provide more personality, and a more modern look
Icons and illustrations: Updated to improve comprehension and consistency on all types of screens
Buttons: “Pill” shapes soften edges and are easier to distinguish
Avatars (the illustrations representing people in trees): New, minimalist leaf shape and more inclusive representations for default avatars

The update changes the appearance of the site and improves site accessibility. It doesn’t introduce new features or affect the way you’ll do most things on the site. There are some minor changes, but most features will continue to operate the same way they did before.

Why we’re making these changes

This update helps us improve things “under the hood,” enabling us to:

modernize Ancestry’s website
improve accessibility
lay the foundation for many planned enhancements
make more frequent updates
launch new features more quickly

This will also align the Ancestry website with our mobile apps, which have already been updated with the same look and feel.

Tree background colors

You can still change the background color of your trees. With this update, we reduced the number of background colors from five to two—a light version and a dark version. This was done to make the Ancestry website more usable for everyone.

Opting out

It’s not possible to switch back to the old look, but you can help us improve it by share your feedback.