Exhaustive Guide to Favicons for WordPress 101

An Introduction to Favicons in WordPress

A Favicon is a unique visual identifier, and simultaneously the simplest thing people will remember about your website. In this series about Favicons for WordPress, we’ll go in-depth and help you understand everything you’ll ever need to get your Favicons just right – what they do, why you need them, and how best to use them!

In part 1, we’ll get you started with them – I mean, if you’ve never heard the term ‘Favicon’ before, you’re probably wondering what these even are.

Favicons

You’ve seen Favicons all your browsing life, in every desktop browser, and even some mobile ones. Long before apps were a thing, Favicons were the precursors of the app logo – Yes, we’re talking about those little icons that head up the title of every tab in your browser. From the distinctive ‘G’ of googling to the serif-ed ‘W’ of Wikipedia and even the ‘f’ of Facebook and the smiling ‘a’ of Amazon – see what we meant by ‘unique visual identifier’?

They’re tiny, for sure – 16 × 16 pixels – and it’s true that they have lost some of their indispensability in the Google Analytics age; they used to be the only credible way to gauge traffic to websites, simply by counting the number of users who had bookmarked the page in question.

But don’t let their small size make you overlook them. In fact, today they are perhaps the easiest way to represent your brand in a browser environment – on the tab bar, in bookmarks, and sometimes even the address bar. Inevitably, they come full circle to become even the icon for your website on smartphones and tablets – just like an app logo.

So from a brand perspective, it’s an easy call to make to have a Favicon for those who wish to provide great UX (user experience) and who like to have complete control over their online branding.

Why Do You Need Favicons?

Firstly, having a Favicon provides a degree of comfort to the users on your website, because it lets them know they’re still where they want to be: on your website. Pretty much any other way of branding your website is going to be obvious and will take away valuable screen real estate as well.

Favicons also go a long way towards adding a little fun to the bland and unremarkable address bar. In addition, when your visitors add a shortcut to your website on their desktop, mobile device screen or the ‘new tab’ page that most browsers have these days, the Favicon doubles as a very visible and distinctive logo.

Needless to say, the visual brand familiarity and ease of use created by a Favicon also help visitors keep coming back to your corner of the online world.

Options When Creating A Favicon

There are quite a few ways in which you can do this. The obvious method is to get in touch with a designer, communicate your branding and vision, and have them create a Favicon that accurately reflects these.

The DIY route is available, of course, and you can definitely try your own hand at making the Favicon. Tools like Faviconer and Favicon.cc exist for this purpose, though someone with more experience with Photoshop or something similar can, of course, take advantage of the advanced capabilities of those.

The plugin option is part of life on WordPress, so how could we not mention it? Favicon generators are available, and they additionally help with generating different sizes and versions of the Favicon to ensure quality on all kinds of devices and screen sizes.

With all that said, however, it is a tiny icon you have to create, so people with any experience at all with creating visual elements will find it trivial to create Favicons.

This should give you a basic, yet clear idea of what a Favicon is and if it’s for you. (It really is.). Join us next time in part 2 where we’ll tackle the nuts and bolts of Favicon creation. Until then, Happy WordPress-ing!

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