Renovating Discord Servers — Everything You Need To Know

Are you thinking of renovating or revamping your Discord server? Here’s how to do it the most efficient way and what you should know before doing so.

Revamping a Discord server is not an easy task. While there are many on Fiverr and Discord itself, that offer such services as a side gig for them, doing it by yourself is an entirely different experience.

Consideration

Revamping a Discord server is a big decision. A revamp may change the entire look and feel of your community. However, the overall theme and premise of your community should stay the same (unless certain situations beg to differ).

The first step to carry out this highly stress-full procedure, you need to make sure you want to do this. This depends on the renovation and to which extend you are renovating. Is it a small channel shuffling or maybe renaming one or two roles? Is it something bigger like changing the icon, banner, or the entire branding? Either way, its important that you carry out the revamp in the most efficient way possible.

So that not only this turn out perfectly for you and your team, your server members gets the latest update of your community in the cleanest way possible.

Planning

Set up a meeting with your team

Discuss the changes: what you will change, why you will do so, and what new systems you will implement. A meeting with your staff/admin team in a voice channel or text will help you get your plans straight.

Visualize ideas

Use tools like witeboard (yes, without the h) to visualize ideas at finger tips. Pro tip using witeboard: you can send people the URL of your board and others will be able to join and draw on your board without creating an account.

It’s also smart to make a to-do list to keep track of everything that’s been done and everything that’s left to do. I personally use Trello, and Notion for all my project management.

Backups & Modifications

If your changes mostly include channel and visual changes, try this method. Create a back up server of your current Discord server with its template, then make your changes on the backup server. This way, even though you have it planned, can see what the final format/setup may look like.

Public Opinions

It is recommended to make a survey for your community asking for specific requests they may have, or how much removing [x] will impact them. The data for surveys like these are highly valuable to your server/project’s future. Which of course, you can showcase or display at the meeting we talked about previously and take your considerations from there.

Execution

Its time to finally put your planning to use.

Assign different tasks to different people. Don’t say: “can someone do x”, instead say: “hey Y, can you do X”. Also fun fact: this is what paramedics recommend we do in case of a roadside accident. When you say it to the general crowd, everyone will depend on the people next to them.

Anyways, make your changes in the server in the shortest time possible. I would not recommend locking down the server: because, you already know what changes you are going to make. The part that’s left to do in the renovation is to do it. Keep your backup server close to your main, then implement the changes the one by one.

I make sure to lock the categories and work on them one at a time. And about not locking general chat, let the hype stay. It’s interesting to see the reactions of users when they see changes being made in front of them.

The final step

The final step is to announce the changes you made. And if you did everything successfully, you now have a freshly renovated server, with the changes you wanted the most in the most efficient way possible.

Final Words

I’m sure not every server needs this level of planning and executions in revamps. However, lately I’ve been seeing a lot more revamps going on in the servers I’m in — doing it inefficiently, hence this article. Some servers I am on have been renovating for days. With locked general chats so there’s no way to provide feedback or ask questions.