Chatbot appearance

What it is

Appearance controls how the chat window looks to visitors: the chatbot's avatar, its header theme, and the colour or gradient behind the header. A live preview sits beside the form so you can see the result before you save.

This is one of three places that affect how things look, and mixing them up is the most common source of "I changed the colour and nothing happened":

Where	Controls	Who sees it
Chatbot Settings → Appearance	Avatar, header theme, header colour or gradient	Visitors, on the hosted page and in the widget
Chatbot Integrations → Web widget	The launcher bubble: corner, size, offsets, auto-open	Visitors, on your site
Sidebar Settings → Appearance	Your dashboard's theme, language, timezone	You, in the dashboard only

Font family and font size are also visitor-facing, but they live on the Messages & language tab, next to the text they apply to.

When you would use it

Before you embed the widget or share the hosted link, so the chat looks like it belongs to your brand rather than to a default template. Also when you change your brand colours and want the chat to follow.

Where to find it

Open Dashboard → Chatbots → your chatbot → Settings → Appearance (?tab=appearance).

Steps

1. Open the chatbot → Settings → Appearance.
2. Avatar. Upload a custom image or keep the template's. Supported formats are JPG, PNG, GIF, and WebP, up to 5 MB. Square images work best, because the avatar renders in a circle. There is a remove control if you want to go back to the default.
3. Header theme. Choose Flat for a single solid colour, or Gradient for a two-tone header.
4. Colour. With Flat, pick the header colour. With Gradient, pick the gradient. Use your actual brand colour rather than something close to it — visitors notice.
5. Watch the live preview. It renders the real chat chrome using the name, description, welcome message, and font you saved on the other tabs, so it is a genuine preview rather than a mock-up.
6. Select Save changes.
7. Reload a hosted-link test window (or your site) to confirm. See Share a hosted link.

Choosing a colour that works

A few practical notes, since the preview will happily let you ship something unreadable:

• Contrast matters more than exactness. The header carries white text. A very light brand colour makes it unreadable; a slightly darker shade of the same hue usually keeps the brand and stays legible.
• Check it in dark mode. Visitors may be browsing with a dark system theme.
• Check it on a phone. The header is proportionally larger on a small screen, so a colour that reads as a tasteful accent on desktop can dominate on mobile.
• The avatar and the header should not fight. A logo with a coloured background inside a differently-coloured header looks like a mistake. A transparent PNG usually solves it.

What you will see

The tab is a form on one side and a chat preview on the other. The preview reads from your other saved tabs, so the greeting text you see is your real welcome message and the typeface is your real chat font. Font family and size are shown here but are edited on Messages & language — see Chatbot messages and language.

Like every settings tab, Save changes appears once something is different, with Discard beside it.

Limits and plan notes

Appearance is available on every plan, including Free. You need permission to edit chatbots.

Appearance applies wherever the chat itself renders — the hosted /agent/{handle} page on any plan, and the website widget once your plan includes integrations. The chatbot must be active for visitors to see any of it. See Activate or pause a chatbot.

Nothing here affects answers, and saving it never triggers retraining or spends credits.

Common problems

The preview looks right but my website widget still looks old.

Brand colours are not baked into the embed snippet — the widget fetches them from the chatbot, and it caches that configuration for a while. Hard-refresh the page first. If it is still stale after a few minutes, recopy the snippet from Integrations → Web widget, and confirm you are not serving your own copy of the widget script from your server (an unsupported setup that will never pick up changes).

My avatar upload is rejected.

The file must be an image (JPG, PNG, GIF, WebP) and under 5 MB. Screenshots and exported logos are often much larger than people expect — resize to roughly 512×512 before uploading.

I changed colours, then changed the language, and the colours reverted.

Each settings tab saves separately. If you had an old browser tab open with stale values and saved from it, it can overwrite newer work. Reopen Appearance, confirm what is actually stored, and save once from a freshly loaded page.

Can visitors upload their own avatar?

No. The avatar here is the chatbot's. If you want a visitor's name shown on the conversation instead of "anonymous", that is a different feature — see Name visitors on the widget.

Does this change my dashboard theme?

No. Dark mode and dashboard language are under the sidebar's Settings → Appearance — see Appearance, language and timezone.