There are over 6.7 million Discord servers, and that number grows every day. Discord, the popular communication app, has evolved from a nerdy place for gamers, into what they attempt to be a place for everyone, and all groups. You see a lot of different categories on Discord, from general communities to games, to role play-related servers, to schools, to advertising, and so much more. Many of our Discord server owners out there may be wondering if we have so many servers on this platform, how is it even possible to grow mine, and how can I make mine even stick out amongst all the noise?

It is a great question, and it’s one that has been looked into thoroughly. At Advertise Your Server, we help people grow their servers every day. It is often asked, what are some of the key things you physically look for when trying to help a server grow. And physically looking is a lot of what is done in our server reviews, we look at channels, organization, how it generally looks… we also look at the name, the logo, the roles, the advertisement, the search engine optimization (SEO), the banner, the website (if you have one), how your bots are set up, your staff team, and we give a general overview of the server and any tips we can find along the way to help you better your growth, i(f you are interested, Join AYS and DM AYS Support and we’d be happy to help you out) so as you can see, we look at quite a lot but two of the most important things are how your server is organized and how it looks.

They go hand in hand. A good looking well-organized server is hard to achieve, but it does significantly help with member retention. Getting people in the door isn’t easy, but what is so much harder is keeping them after they join. If your server is an absolute disaster with channels all over and no organization, it is much less likely to retain members than servers who have the channel structure thought out and well developed. I’ve included a screenshot of our channel structure here at AYS.

Now let’s go through it step by step.

Channel Layout

As you see everything is very well organized and laid out. We have the “Welcome to AYS” category, which has all the channels for new members (and old) to find information about our server and network. We keep a welcome channel that has the starting details, the rules, a tutorial, our announcements channels, and some other important channels. These are right at the top to highlight their importance, and they all go together as the information channels. The benefit of this setup is that it makes sense to the member. The member will be able to easily understand that if they need information on something, they can likely find it in this channel. 

We then have our events and giveaways channel. This obviously has all the events and giveaways, once again grouping them together by category or purpose.

Finally (in this screenshot), we have our chatrooms and our entertainment channels, we keep all of the community interaction and ongoing entertainment channels here. This once again keeps that logical structure of grouping things together by the purpose, which makes the server layout intuitive. As you scroll down the channel list, you will continue to see that we carry this all the way through the server.

We at AYS have a ton of channels! However, we are very careful and think about how to organize the channel so (for the most part) it is still a very simple and intuitive experience for our members. There is no digging around looking because it is all generally grouped together.

Channel Looks

I named this blog post, “[name here]” this doesn’t only include the organization, but also the looks, if you draw your attention back to the screenshot of the channel list here at AYS, you can tell that we have assigned every channel an emoji. The consistency of this creates a good look, and it helps with channel identification. If you frequent a channel, you can remember to look for the robot emoji, and you don’t have to look for “bot-commands-playground”. Meaning that the emojis are twofold. It helps the member experience and at the very same time, it helps create a clean appealing look.

Really when it comes down to it, when making an appealing server, you have two focuses, the literal looks of the server, keep it clean, keep it logical, don’t be a mess about it. And the organization is very closely intertwined with the looks and feel of the server. I give the same advice, keep it clean, keep it logical. When you do this not only does it create a great-looking server, it creates a very intuitive user experience. Which is crucial for member retention, that being the ability your server has to retain members.