Change the Background Color of an HTML Table

This article explains the methods for changing the background colors of parts of a table on a website.

The older method used the attribute bgcolor to change the background color of a table. It could also be used to change the color of a table row or a table cell. But the bgcolor attribute has been deprecated in favor of style sheets, so it's not the optimal way to manipulate a table's background color.

The better way to change the background color is to add the style property background-color to the table, row, or cell tag.

This example changes the background color of an entire table:

To change the color of a single row, insert the background-color property in the

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You can change the color of a single cell by adding the attribute to the

You can also apply background colors to table heads, or the  

Change Background Color Using Style Sheets

However, it's better to avoid using the background-color attribute in favor of a correctly formatted style sheet. For example, you can set the styles in a style sheet at the HEAD of your HTML document or set them in an external style sheet. Changes like these in the HEAD or an external style sheet might appear like these for tables, rows, and cells:

table { background-color: #ff0000; }
tr { background-color: yellow; }
td { background-color: #000; }

Setting Column Background Color

The best way to set the background color for a column is to create a style class and then assign it to the column's cells. Creating a class allows you to assign that class to the cells in a specific column using one attribute.

The CSS:

td.ColColor { background-color: blue; }

The HTML:

cell 1cell 2cell 1cell 2

One significant advantage of controlling background colors through a style sheet is that you can change your color choice later. Rather than going through the HTML document and making the change to every single cell, you can make a single change to the color choice in the CSS that will immediately be applied to every instance where the class="ColColor" syntax appears.