Changing the look

SharePoint lets you apply custom styles and colors to your site so that it closely aligns with the branding guidelines defined by your organization.

In this recipe, we will look at how to change the look and feel of a SharePoint site, primarily by changing its theme.

Getting ready

You will need Design or Full Control permissions in your site to be able to apply a custom theme.

How to do it...

To change the theme of your site, browse to the site and follow these steps:

Congratulations! You just changed the theme for your site.

How it works...

There are multiple ways in which you can "brand" a SharePoint site so that it matches other sites and areas in your organization's Microsoft 365 tenant. The following is a list of some of the customizations you can make to your SharePoint site:

The options that are available to you depend on your role in the organization and the permissions that have been granted to you. If you have been granted access to brand your site, you will likely want to make sure that it adheres to your organization's branding and theming guidelines. That way, it will align better with other organization's content or websites and thus give your site's users a more consistent and familiar experience. Here's a great infographic from the Microsoft support team on how to customize your site: https://m365book.page.link/Customize-Site-Infographic.

An important caveat to note is that Microsoft pushes updates to Microsoft 365 and SharePoint online from time to time. Therefore, you will want to make sure that any changes you make using custom code or third-party tools adhere to Microsoft's guidance regarding branding customizations so that they are compatible with such updates.

Finally, if you are working with the classic experience, this support article will show you how to change the look for such a site: https://m365book.page.link/Classic-Design.

We discussed the modern versus classic experience as part of the Modern versus classic experience topic of the Creating a modern site recipe in Chapter 2, Introduction to SharePoint Online.

See also