What Is a Favicon and How to Create One for Your WordPress Website
What Is A Favicon?
A favicon is a small, 16x16 pixel icon that represents your website. It is displayed in the browser's address bar, next to your site's name in bookmarks and on tabs, and is also used by search engines as a way to identify your site.
Creating a favicon for your WordPress website is a great way to improve your branding and make your site more recognisable.
What Are the Benefits of Having a Favicon?
There are several benefits of having a favicon for your WordPress website. First, it can help improve your branding. Having a consistent favicon across all of your devices will make your brand more recognisable and memorable. Second, it can help users find your website more easily. If someone has multiple tabs open in their browser, they will be able to quickly find your site by looking for your favicon. Finally, it can add an extra level of professionalism to your website.
How to Create a Favicon for Your WordPress Website
Creating a favicon for your WordPress website is actually quite simple. The first step is to go to the Site Identity section of the Customiser and upload your desired icon. Once you have done this, you can go to the Header & Footer section and drag the Favicon widget into the header area. This will display your favicon in the header of your website.
If you want more control over where your favicon appears on your website, you can use a plugin like WP Favicons. This plugin gives you the ability to choose where you want your favicon to appear, as well as the option to add HTML code directly into the header or footer of your site.
If you're going to be designing a favicon, there are free websites to help you such as Favicon Generator and Favicon CC.
Design Considerations
PNG is a great format to save in if you want your favicon transparent or with an effect like glass. It also provides smaller filesize than other image types so it’s easier on the internet connection!
Ideally your favicon should relate to your brand, so a smaller version of your logo would be ideal. But consider how it needs to be seen, so fiddly bits, blurry colours are not a good idea. Think precise, bright and simple. If your logo already has high contrast colours, that's even better.
If you are going through a branding process, your brand designer should be considering how your logo will work across all of your marketing and sales platforms, including your favicon.
But, What If You've Added A Favicon and Now It's Disappeared?
This sometimes happens when you update the theme. You can overcome this problem by using FTP to upload your Favicon.
FTP stands for "File Transfer Protocol". It's a way to move files from one place to another over the internet. When you want to download a file from a website, you are using FTP.
You can also use FTP to upload files from your computer to a website. For example, if you have a website, you can use FTP to upload new pages or images.FTP is a very old protocol. It was first used in the 1970s! But it is still used today because it works well and it is simple to use.
A favicon is a small but important part of any WordPress website. Creating a favicon can improve branding, make it easier for users to find your site, and add an extra level of professionalism. Follow the steps above to create a favicon for your own WordPress website today!