Favicons in WordPress: How to increase your brand presence

Favicons are most commonly known as small icons that appear next to website names in browser tabs. Although the WordPress favicon is primarily used in this context, it also finds use in other places like bookmarks in browsers, home screen buttons on iOS devices, and more.

That's why it's an essential part of your branding. A well-placed favicon or "site icon" can help users identify your business at a glance. Not only does it help increase brand awareness, but it can also improve the user experience (UX) on your website.

This article discusses the advantages of using a favicon in a WordPress website is discussed, followed by instructions on how to create such a symbol. Let's get started.

The benefits of using a favicon in WordPress

If you've ever been faced with a lot of open tabs in your browser, you know how valuable a favicon can be. A favicon makes it easier for users to quickly recognize your website, even when many tabs are open:

Depending on the number of tabs you have open, the title of your website may not always be visible. Therefore, adding a favicon helps improve the user experience.

Using a WordPress favicon not only increases your brand awareness, but also gives your website a professional and trustworthy appearance. This, in turn, can boost customer confidence.

When someone saves your website to the home screen of their mobile device, your favicon appears as an icon. Using your brand logo or similar icons can increase the recognizability of your website and help create a cohesive aesthetic overall.

How to create a favicon for WordPress

In the past, you had to use a special ICO file for your favicon. Nowadays, however, all modern browsers support ICO, PNG, and GIF files for favicons. JPEG is also widely supported (JPG vs. JPEG), but not in all versions of Internet Explorer, which makes it less ideal for favicons.

If you are familiar with Photoshop, you can create a favicon manually. However, it's often easier to use a user-friendly cloud-based tool to generate a favicon icon set from an existing image.

RealFaviconGenerator is an excellent option for several reasons:

• It allows you to create app icons.
• It offers favicon icons in both PNG and ICO formats.
• You can customize your favicon after uploading your image.
• All you need to do is to paste the provided code into your website.

Other useful favicon generators are:

• Favicon.cc, which allows you to create a favicon from scratch or upload an existing image.
• Favicon Generator, which works similar to RealFaviconGenerator.

To use RealFaviconGenerator, start by selecting your desired image by clicking "Select Image":

On the next page you can customize specific details for your favicon set if needed. After you're done, scroll down and click Generate Favicons and HTML Code:

Click on the favicon package on the next page to download your favicon images:

It is important to keep this page open if you plan to manually add the favicon to your website.

Tips for creating a favicon

There are some design and formatting tips that are worth considering before creating your favicon. The recommended size for favicons is usually 512 x 512 pixels.

Although the WordPress favicon is a square, you can also use a rectangular image and crop it later in WordPress when you add it via the Customizer. Note that your favicon is usually displayed as a 16×16 pixel square, so it's important to make sure it's easily recognizable even at this small size. However, it is advisable to use the Google Guidelines for creating and using favicons to ensure that your icon displays optimally in search engines and browser tabs.