How to Create a Favicon for Your WordPress Blog
A favicon, short for ‘favorites icon,’ is the tiny icon that appears beside a web address in your browser, and it also appears beside saved bookmarks. A favicon helps to establish your website and your brand, and adding one to your WordPress blog provides a small but significant visual representation of your online presence. A favicon will typically be a brand logo or anything else that you regularly use to for identifying your various online resources. You can generate a favicon in most graphic design and editing programs, and for it to be displayed correctly, it should be 16×16 pixels and saved as favicon.ico. While there are numerous plugins that allow you to easily add a favicon to your WordPress blog, manually generating one is also a fairly simple process.
- Using an FTP client (most hosting companies provide a web-based one that should be accessible from your account page), upload your favicon.ico file into the folder of your current theme. This folder will be located in wordpresswp-contentthemes.
- Upload another copy of your favicon.ico file to the root directory of your FTP server, as this will allow the icon to appear in RSS feeds for your blog.
- Login to your WordPress administrator dashboard and navigate to Appearance > Editor to edit your current theme.
- Locate the Header template in the sidebar to the right and click on header.php.
- Search for the line of code beginning with <link rel=”shortcut icon”. If this line does not exist, then add it just below the <head> HTML tag near the top of the page. Edit or enter the code so that it appears like this:
<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”/favicon.ico” /> - Click “Update File” to save your changes.
- If you change your theme, you will need to repeat the above steps while also remembering to upload a copy of your favicon.ico file to the root directory of the new theme.
- If you want to have a favicon with a transparent background, you need to use the PNG format and save your file as favicon.png.
- If you prefer to use a plugin rather than using the manual method detailed above, you can do so using All in One Favicon, Multicons, or Captain Favicon among others.
