How to Get HEX Codes from Any Website in 1 Click (No DevTools)

A HEX code is just a color written as six hexadecimal digits — #FF6A00 is orange, #1A1A1A is near-black. Every website is built from them, and sooner or later every designer, developer, or marketer needs to lift one from a live page. There are three ways to do it, and the right one depends entirely on how many colors you need. Here they are, ranked by effort, with honest trade-offs.

Method 1 — DevTools: free, precise, slow

Every browser ships with developer tools, and they show you the exact color values a site's CSS defines. No install needed:

1. Right-click the element whose color you want and choose Inspect.
2. In the Elements panel, find the element (or a parent — colors often come from inherited rules).
3. Open the Computed tab and look for color or background-color.
4. Click the color swatch to copy the HEX value.

Pros: always available, exact values, free. Cons: you hunt through the DOM for every single color, and telling brand colors apart from one-off shades is on you.Verdict: perfect when you need one or two colors. Miserable for a full palette.

Method 2 — Eyedropper extension: fast, approximate

Eyedropper extensions (ColorZilla and open-source alternatives like Eye Dropper by kepi) let you click any pixel on the page and copy its color. Install once, then it is two clicks per color.

Pros: fast per color, no DOM hunting, works on images and canvas too. Cons: it samples rendered pixels, not the site's defined colors — opacity, shadows, gradients, and compression all shift the value you get. You will occasionally copy a shade that is close but wrong. Verdict: great for quick checks ("what's that button color?"), unreliable as the source of truth for a design system. See our honest ColorZilla alternatives comparison if you are choosing between pickers.

Method 3 — One-click extraction: the full palette at once

Instead of picking colors one by one, read the page's computed CSS directly and take all of them:

1. Install ChromaPick from the Chrome Web Store — free, no account, 5 extractions per month.
2. Open any website and click the extension icon. The page is scanned in one pass.
3. Copy the HEX codes. Colors come grouped by role — brand, neutral, background, accent — with contrast ratios, ready to copy individually or export as a set.

Pros: exact computed values (no pixel sampling error), the whole palette in seconds, grouped by role so you know what each color is. Cons: requires installing an extension; the free tier caps at 5 extractions per month. Verdict:the right tool when you need several colors or the complete palette — which is most real work.

Side-by-side comparison

Which method should you use?

• One color, right now → DevTools. Ten seconds, exact, nothing to install.
• A few colors from images or tricky spots → an eyedropper extension.
• The site's full palette, accurately → one-click extraction. This is also the starting point for deeper palette work and for checking color contrast accessibility once you have the values.

What to do with the HEX codes

Raw hex codes are only useful once they live somewhere: paste them into Figma as styles (see copying website colors into Figma), or generate variations with a palette generator tool. If you extract palettes regularly, Pro ($10 one-time, 7-day money-back guarantee) removes the monthly cap and adds code exports for handoff.

HEX, RGB, or HSL: which format should you copy?

HEX is the lingua franca — every design tool and stylesheet accepts it, which is why this guide targets it. But the other formats have their uses: RGB is what you want when opacity matters (the alpha channel in rgba()), and HSL is the best format for adjusting colors, because hue, saturation, and lightness map to how humans think about color. Need a darker variant of a brand color? In HSL you just lower the lightness; in HEX you are guessing digits.

Practical rule: copy in HEX for handoff and storage, convert to HSL when you need to build tints and shades. ChromaPick shows values in multiple formats, so you rarely have to convert by hand — but knowing why you would pick one format over another saves real confusion the first time a developer asks for "the same color at 60% opacity" and your HEX-only palette cannot answer.

A quick note on color accuracy

One thing beginners trip over: the HEX code is exact, but the color you see depends on your display. A wide-gamut monitor renders the same #FF6A00 more vividly than a standard sRGB screen. For web work this rarely matters — browsers and Figma both operate in sRGB by default, so the hex value is the source of truth and what you see is close enough. Just do not be surprised if a color looks slightly different on your phone versus your laptop; that is the display, not a wrong value.

Related guides

• How to Extract Color Palettes from Any Website — the full technique behind method 3.
• How to Check Web Color Contrast — validate the colors you just grabbed.
• Website Color Palette Generator Tools — build new palettes from the ones you extract.