How to change your Discord background: Full Guide

Discord is a text and voice chat program that lets users share conversations and media. Users share these communications via private messages or in permanent chat rooms and voice channels called servers.

With 150 million active monthly users, Discord is a major electronic communication service provider. So, given how many users are on the platform, it must be easy to personalize your account, right?

Making usernames and changing profile pictures is easy enough, but changing Discord’s background image is a little tougher. Let’s take a look at how to change your Discord background and the steps you’ll have to take to make it happen.

How to Change Your Discord Background

If you go searching in your user settings, you’ll find that there is no option to change your background in Discord. This is because that feature isn’t part of Discord’s normal functions. If you want to change your background image, you’ll need an add-on called BetterDiscord. 

You’ll need this if you want to easily switch out your Discord background theme; whether that’s because you want a custom Discord background or you just simply want to switch from the default themes.

There’s no way to change your background in the Discord app via the user settings – you can only choose between the light and dark theme that Discord offer (also referred to as Discord Dark Mode).

You do get a good amount of customisation options when you sign up to Discord Nitro or Nitro Classic. This can be worth doing if you want the ability to customize Discord using your appearance settings.

You get the ability to change your Discord background image for videos, adjust your banner and make more changes in your app settings – but it still won’t allow you to change the Discord background entirely.

However, you can do this using the BetterDiscord app. Here’s how you can use it to get a custom Discord background theme on your device.

BetterDiscord – What Is It?

BetterDiscord is an add-on for Discord that expands on the features in Discord. BetterDiscord adds the ability to change the background image of your program using Themes.

Themes are images and layouts for Discord that have been curated and approved for use by the BetterDiscord devs.  It will allow you to switch to a custom Discord theme if you wish.

BetterDiscord also lets you increase Discord’s functionality with plugins. These suites add in extra features, such as volume controls, Spotify integration, and other quality of life improvements to the UI.

You can choose to add or remove plugins as you wish. The only thing that comes installed with BetterDiscord is the ability to access these themes and plugins. 

The good thing is that BetterDiscord is pretty easy to use, so you don’t need to worry about coding or any Javascript errors in Discord occurring when you’re using it.

BetterDiscord and Discord’s Terms of Service

Before you rush to get this software, you should know that this add-on is against Discord’s terms of service. BetterDiscord mentions this in the FAQ section of their website.

The team also mentions that Discord has yet to ban anyone from using this plugin because they don’t have a way to run checks for these plugins on the user side of things. 

Ultimately, it will be up to you to decide if this is something you want to use. If you’d rather not risk Discord introducing a way to check for these and losing your account, then BetterDiscord might not be the solution for you. 

Step-By-Step Breakdown

Once you’ve decided to use BetterDiscord, understanding how to change your Discord background can be achieved with the following steps: 

1. Download BetterDiscord: Go to the BetterDiscord website and select the “Download” option on their homepage, or you can head directly to their Github.

2. Run the BetterDiscord installer: Once the program installs, you’ll open it up from where you downloaded the file and follow the prompts to install the program. 

3. Download a theme from the BetterDiscord website: The installer automatically connects to Discord, so now you need to go grab a theme from the options on BetterDiscord’s library of themes.

4. Open Discord and copy the theme into the Theme folder: Once the theme downloads, go into Discord and open your new Theme tab to copy the theme you downloaded into this folder. 

5. Enable the background in your Theme settings: Once the file copies, you can activate the theme with the slider toggle and turn your background from gray to whatever you downloaded!

6. Done! – Once you’ve done this, you can use your custom themes made by BetterDiscord whenever you want, and switch between each Discord theme file depending on what you need.

Right now, BetterDiscord only works on desktop computers running either Windows or MacOS. Linux computers, as well as mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, aren’t able to run this add-on right now.

The Discord mobile app works much differently than the desktop application and the BetterDiscord team doesn’t yet have their enhancement suite available for mobile devices. 

If something goes wrong during the process, the BetterDiscord installer has a repair feature to fix the add-on. If you run the installer again, you can select the “Repair BetterDiscord” option to have the software fix itself and your issue. 

The FAQ for BetterDiscord is a good resource for all sorts of info about the add-on. Use it to your advantage, especially if you get stuck or confused!

Changing Your Theme in Discord

While Discord doesn’t allow the background image to be changed, you can change the theme of the default program in your application – you have the option to choose between dark or light mode too.

If you select the gear wheel and go into your settings, you can find these options under the Appearance section. 

Select the Appearance option, then the Themes option, and you can adjust the light level and theme for your Discord application.

The Dark and Light modes will change the color of your program windows. Cozy and Comfortable adjust how your private messages will look on your end. 

Summary

Discord doesn’t offer much in the way of personalizing your application’s appearance. While you can adjust the color scheme and display format somewhat, users that want to customize the program have to use outside resources to do so. 

You have the option to choose whether to go for dark or light themes depending on your own preference. Creating a custom theme potentially can be done by changing background themes in your Discord client.

When choosing how to change your Discord background, BetterDiscord is the most popular way to achieve this but doesn’t fall in line with Discord’s terms of service.

If you decide to use their enhancement suite, then you’ll find that the process is straightforward, as long as you can keep track of where files download during the steps. 

Once you’ve got Discord set the way you like it, you’re good to go back into your chats and calls with everything looking the way you like it!