Adding A Site Icon or Favicon to Your WordPress Site

A Site Icon or Favicon is the little icon shown on a browsers tab to help people browsing the web to quickly identify your site.

And as you can see from the image above – I forgot mine – whoopsie!

Do You Need a Favicon

Whilst the answer is no, you don’t NEED a favicon, it does improve both the usability and site / brand recognition of your site and I’d go so far as to say you may loose out without one.

How does it improve usability?  Well from the above image it’s not really clear but take a look at the tab bar below

Most people have lots of tabs open (I know I do), and a site without an identifiable favicon is simply hard to find.

You’ll need an 512×512 icon before you can proceed – in either JPEG, PNG or GIF before you can proceed.  Personally I would opt for PNG with a transparent background.

Adding Your Favicon To Your WordPress Site

Since WordPress 4.3 your favicon can be added via the WordPress admin section.  Before this it was far more fiddly.  If you have 4.2 or below installed then tough, I’m not telling you how to do it.  Get your WordPress updated and then come back .

1. From the WordPress Admin section, go to Appearance->Customize.

2. Click on Site Identity.

3. Click Select Image and select your image.

4. Job done.

Depending on your logo you may have text that is not readable – but if your logo is still distinguishable that should not matter.