Elevate your YouTube brand and attract hordes of subscribers with a simple trick: changing and updating your YouTube banner. The process is easy, and we’re here to walk you through it step-by-step.
To learn how to change your YouTube banner, simply follow our tutorial below. For all other information, and if you have any other questions, please see our FAQs at the end of this article.
Table of Contents
- Open your preferred web browser on your PC, and head to YouTube’s Creator Studio. Once there, sign into your YouTube channel account.
- Note: alternatively, you can go to YouTube, head to ‘My Channel’, and then click ‘Customize Channel’ toward the top-right of the page.
- Note: alternatively, you can go to YouTube, head to ‘My Channel’, and then click ‘Customize Channel’ toward the top-right of the page.
- From the sidebar to the left of the page, scroll down to and click on ‘Customization’
- Click on the Branding tab
- Next, scroll down to ‘Banner image’ and click on ‘Change’ (or ‘Upload’ if you’ve yet to upload one)
- Note that the file you select for your new banner image must be of minimum dimensions 2048 x 1152 pixels, aspect ratio 16:9, and must be no larger than 6MB.
- Lastly, choose an image from your computer and double-click on it; then, on the next screen, crop the image appropriately and click ‘Done/Finish/Upload’
- Click Publish to save the changes
- Your new banner, if accepted by YouTube’s Creator Studio, will be uploaded and appear as your banner image on your channel fairly immediately
And there you have it! It’s a super simple process and one which we hope will help you to build your brand. If you have any further unanswered queries or are looking for any more information, please see the FAQs below.
Frequently asked questions
Long gone are the days when YouTube was simply a place to find silly cat videos, music videos, and homemade compilations of amusing clips. Today, YouTube is a marketplace just like any other popular social media platform.
Independent creators, as well as giant corporate businesses, are today utilizing YouTube as a place to brand themselves, reach out to potential followers and customers, and as a place to catalogue their work. Your YouTube channel is now an important landing page for all potential fans and subscribers.
As such, stylizing your channel to represent you and your brand has never been more important. On top of a clear, coherent and attention-grabbing profile picture, you’re going to want a banner image that states clearly who you are, what you do, and why any potential visitor should become a lifelong subscriber.
There are typically few restrictions to the content of your YouTube channel. However, as with all interactions on social media, you don’t want to include anything offensive or any material deemed insensitive. This includes any directly nude images, pornographic content, foul language, and the like.
Aside from this, you can go wild. We would recommend, however, that you optimize your banner image for the dimensions suggested by YouTube. This includes any text or imagery which you deem important to the banner image. At the minimum suggested image size dimensions, the “safe-area” for logos and text is 1235 x 338 pixels. If you place text or logos out with these dimensions, you may find that they are cropped out of view on certain devices, or in certain views.
YouTube banners must be at minimum 2048 x 1152 pixels. The aspect ratio should be 16:9 (standard for YouTube videos, as well). Note that even this image will be subject to cropping on certain devices or in particular views, so it’s always worth playing around with different crops, dimensions, and aspect ratios until you find the one which works best for your banner.
One last important thing to note is that your banner image must be no larger than 6MB. If you try to upload a file of a larger size than 6MB, YouTube’s Creator Studio will reject it.
This is a common problem, you’re not alone! If you’ve created a high-res image and the file size exceeds YouTube’s maximum 6MB, then you’ll need to resize the image. You can do this pretty easily on any computer’s default photo-viewing application, or sometimes directly from the folder.
Try right-clicking on your file in its folder and see if there’s a ‘resize’ option. If not, open it in your default image viewing application, and resize it from there. Depending on the starting size of the file, you may only need to reduce it to 90% of its original quality, or perhaps a lot more.
Play around with resizing your image until you get a version that is sufficient quality and which falls below the 6MB threshold.
