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How to Change Your Background or Theme on Discord

With over 140 million active users, Discord has exploded in popularity as a platform for gaming communities and friend groups to hang out.

One of the secrets behind Discord‘s success is its focus on customization and personalization. From your profile pic and username to your user status, Discord gives you ample options to express yourself.

However, customizing your background and theme is surprisingly limited out of the box. Unlike other social apps like WhatsApp or Telegram, Discord doesn‘t let you directly change your chat wallpaper or colors.

But don‘t fret – you can unlock nearly endless theme options with the help of a fantastic third party plugin called BetterDiscord.

In this guide, I‘ll share how to use BetterDiscord to customize your Discord background and theme. As a social media marketing expert who has helped manage communities with over 50,000 members, I‘ve picked up plenty of Discord modding tips and tricks.

Here‘s what I‘ll cover:

  • What is BetterDiscord and why is it useful?
  • Step-by-step instructions to install and use BetterDiscord
  • Where to find the best custom themes and plugins
  • Advanced customization with CSS code tweaks
  • Extra tips to use BetterDiscord like a pro

Let‘s dive in and transform your Discord!

What is BetterDiscord? A Customization Game-Changer

BetterDiscord is a free plugin built by the Discord community that supercharges your ability to customize the look, feel, and functionality of your Discord client.

Once installed, BetterDiscord gives you access to:

  • Beautiful premade themes to change colors, backgrounds, icons, fonts, and more
  • A theme library with hundreds of options to browse
  • Custom CSS to fine-tune individual elements like channels, menus, text, etc
  • Helpful plugins that enhance and add features to Discord
  • Global emoji support to use any emoji on any server

In my experience managing large Discord communities, BetterDiscord is a total game-changer. It allows you to personalize Discord to match your own aesthetic tastes.

For example, as a night owl, I love using dark mode themes on all my apps. With BetterDiscord, I was able to find a slick black and purple theme that perfectly suits my preference for darker interfaces.

The ability to tweak every element with custom CSS takes things even further. I also use a plugin to display my servers in compact columns rather than a single row since I‘m part of many communities.

These are customizations that Discord doesn‘t natively allow, but BetterDiscord opens up infinite possibilities.

Is BetterDiscord Safe to Use?

Now you might be wondering – is BetterDiscord allowed and safe to use?

Technically no – Discord does prohibit the use of unauthorized third party mods in its Terms of Service.

However, Discord generally turns a blind eye to usage of BetterDiscord. Millions use it with no repercussions. I haven‘t heard of a single user being banned solely for using BetterDiscord.

While not officially condoned, BetterDiscord is developed by a respected team and used by Discord community servers with over 100,000 members without issue.

I personally have used BetterDiscord for over a year with no problems. Just don‘t make a habit of mentioning it to Discord‘s official support channels and you should be fine.

The small risk is absolutely worth it for the incredible amount of customization power in my opinion.

Okay, let‘s go through how to get BetterDiscord set up!

Step 1) Download and Install BetterDiscord

Getting started with BetterDiscord takes just a minute or two:

  1. Close Discord entirely if you have it open
  2. Visit betterdiscord.app
  3. Click the download button for the BetterDiscord installer
  4. Run the installer and follow prompts to install into Discord
  5. Launch Discord – BetterDiscord will be injected and ready to use!

You‘ll know it worked because you‘ll see a new "Themes" tab added to Discord‘s settings menu. This is how you manage and customize BetterDiscord.

Step 2) Install Themes to Change Your Background

With BetterDiscord now set up, it‘s time to install some themes and give your background a makeover!

BetterDiscord themes are essentially just custom CSS code files created by the community. There‘s a massive selection to browse on betterdiscord.app/themes.

To install a theme:

  1. Pick a theme you like and download it
  2. In Discord, open the Themes tab > Open Theme Folder
  3. Drag your downloaded theme file into the folder
  4. Enable the theme in the Themes settings tab

That‘s all – your Discord background will instantly change to reflect the theme!

Here are a couple great themes to try for nice background aesthetics:

  • ClearVision: A super clean and minimalist transparent theme. One of my favorites.
  • Grape: Soft purple colors with custom background fog gradient.
  • Blizzard: Dark blue tones with animated snow visuals.

Browse the theme library to find one that suits your taste – you can have as many installed as you want.

Step 3) Customize with CSS for Advanced Changes

While premade themes are great for overall changes, for truly advanced customization you‘ll want to tweak your own CSS.

CSS controls the visual styling of each element in Discord‘s interface. Using BetterDiscord you can override CSS to customize anything:

  • Channel background colors
  • Menu layouts
  • Font changes
  • Individual server icons
  • Animations/transitions

It takes some learning, but gives you unlimited control. Let‘s walk through CSS customization:

  1. Enable Developer Mode in Discord settings > Appearance
  2. Right click any element > Inspect to view its CSS
  3. Edit the CSS values to make changes
  4. Save edits as a CSS snippet in BetterDiscord
  5. Enable your snippet to apply customizations

For example, I used CSS to change the background color of my chat channels to a nice light grey:

.channels-3g2vYe {
  background-color: #f5f5f5;
}

I also added custom icons for some of my servers:

.guildIcon-2QSL7B[src=‘/icons/server1.png‘] {
  background-image: url(https://example.com/new_icon.png);
}

The possibilities are endless! You can spend hours finely tuning everything to your preferences with CSS. Check out BetterDocs to explore Discord CSS selectors.

Extend Functionality with Helpful Plugins

In addition to visual customization, BetterDiscord also allows you to install handy plugins to improve Discord functionality.

There are over 700 plugins created by the community offering a range of useful utilities:

  • Server folders to better organize 100+ servers
  • Notification sounds to set custom alerts
  • Do not track to prevent metadata logging
  • Link previews to show webpage previews
  • Permission viewer to see channel permissions
  • Emote menu to manage your emotes
  • And much more!

Plugins can be downloaded through the BetterDiscord settings menu in Discord. Test out different ones to see which suit your needs.

Some of my essential picks are:

  • Server Folders: Massively improves organization for big servers
  • InvisibleTyping: Hides typing indicators when you want privacy
  • Read All Notifications Button: Quickly clear pesky notification counts

BetterDiscord Tips and Tricks

Here are some extra tips and advice for getting the most out of BetterDiscord:

  • Update themes and plugins regularly to ensure compatibility after Discord updates. Outdated add-ons can cause crashing.

  • Stack multiple themes together for unique mixed aesthetics. But don‘t go overboard or it can slow down Discord.

  • Back up your BetterDiscord folder periodically to save your themes, plugins, and custom CSS.

  • Use the Snippets plugin to sync your custom CSS between multiple devices.

  • Join the BetterDiscord Discord server for help and support.

  • Did you know BetterDiscord lets you add custom external emotes and use them globally? Surprise friends with rare emojis!

Take your time poking around all of BetterDiscord‘s options – there‘s so much to uncover. Before you know it, you‘ll have a personalized Discord fine-tuned exactly how you like it.

Let me know if you have any other questions! I‘m always happy to provide tips to customize Discord.

Transform Your Discord Experience with BetterDiscord

As Discord continues growing into a mainstream social platform, customization and personal expression are more important than ever. Out of the box, Discord disappointingly falls short in options to tailor the experience.

This is where BetterDiscord comes to the rescue!

Thanks to its library of beautiful themes, extensive custom CSS capabilities, and handy plugins, you can mod Discord in almost any way imaginable.

For social media managers like myself who live in Discord daily while engaging communities, the ability to customize Discord to my exact tastes is invaluable. The app feels like my own rather than an imposed experience.

So don‘t settle for bland default Discord – install BetterDiscord and unlock thousands of ways to make Discord distinctly yours!

I hope this guide has shown how seamless and powerful enhancing Discord can be. Let me know if you have any other questions down below!

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