Someone asked me how to use a favicon with a WordPress blog the other day, and it wasn’t as simple as adding a favicon to a traditional website.
What the heck’s a favicon?
A favicon is a small image (.ico extension) which, when correctly configured with your website or blog, appears in the browser of the person visiting your website. Most usefully, it also adds itself to the person’s bookmarks when they bookmark your site.
I’ve added a small favicon to the giteguru.com website, and here’s a screengrab of it in Firefox and Chrome, plus what it looks like in my Chrome bookmarks. Go ahead and bookmark this post (CTRL + D), then check out what it looks like in your own bookmarks.
Firefox Browser showing favicon at beginning of URL
Chrome browser showing favicon
Chrome Bookmarks showing favicon
I searched around a bit for a solution and found this useful blog post on the subject, giving a step by step guide on how to create and add the favicon by creating and installing a WordPress plugin. In a nutshell:
- Create an image 16px x 16px and save it as favicon.ico (using Photoshop, Gimp or my preference, Paint.net)
- Upload it to the root of your WordPress THEME folder using an FTP programme
- Copy the php code on the blog posts page into a text editor such as Notepad, or my preference, Notepad ++
- Create a new folder on your desktop called ‘favicon’
- File > Save As > favicon.php (into the favicon folder on your desktop)
- FTP the folder and it’s contents to your wp plugins directory
- In your WP admin, activate the ‘favicon’ plugin
Now go to your website / blog homepage, and hit CTRL F5 to clear the cache and refresh the page. Your favicon should be in place for all to see.
Go on... click it... you know you want to!
6 Comments
Very helpful for me dude. I also need to add favicon on my wordpress blog. I just bookmarked your post .Thanks a lot
Same here. Real helpful to me. Will add a flavicon to my blogs either. Great site, Monsieur Gite Guru. Félicitations et congratulations. Will come back for more infos/Wordpress tutorials…
Sounds like a cool way to add a personal touch on wordpress blogs. This also helps create a brand of some sort helping your subscribers identify you easily. Many thanks to you dude! I’ll surely add this to my wordpress blogs as soon as I can create a unique icon.
I really do favicon on the sites I’ve worked. Thanks for the good thoughts.
I usually do favicon too in most of my wordpress sites. Thanks for your thoughts.
Nice I’m done adding favicon to my wordpress. Now I gotta figure out how to do it to my other blogs