Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

How To Give Your Site A Favorite Icon

By David Walsh on August 1, 2007

Undoubtedly, you've been to websites that have a custom icon in the address bar. Oftentimes the icon is the organization logo, mascot, or at the very least the organization's colors. There's a lot more to the favorite icon than most people probably think.

Advantages of the favorite icon include:

File size is extremely small, so there's no real increase in load time
Favorite icons are cached, which means a one-time download (until cache expires)
You can explicitly set the favorite icon but an implicit file is checked if one is not defined
Increased website credibility and branding
Shows users professionalism and attention to detail
Most browsers use your cached favorite icon as the favorite / bookmark icon
Incredibly easy to "install"

Favorite Icon Requirements & Recommendations

If there is no favorite icon defined in the <head> section of your page, the browser will look for a "favicon.ico file in your website's home directory. Your favorite icon should be a .ico file; Mozilla Firefox accepts PNG files but for maximum browser compatibility, use a true icon file. Your icon should be 16 pixels wide by 16 pixels tall (32x32 will be scaled downward, though) and 256 color is the optimal palette.

So how do you do it? There are a few ways.

Implicitly Selected Favorite Icon

Simply place your "favicon.ico file in your website's home directory. Simple.

Explicitly Choosing Your Favorite Icon

Yes, the "<link>" tag is used for more than just stylesheets! You can define your favorite icon by placing the following code in the <head> section of your website:

<link href="/favicon.ico" rel="shortcut icon" type="image/x-icon" />

Summary

If you really want to show your website visitors that you care about attention to detail, use a custom favorite icon. There is minimal effort involved in creating an icon and the advantages are worth the time spent.

Recent Features

By David WalshJuly 15, 2013
9 Mind-Blowing WebGL Demos
As much as developers now loathe Flash, we're still playing a bit of catch up to natively duplicate the animation capabilities that Adobe's old technology provided us. Of course we have canvas, an awesome technology, one which I highlighted 9 mind-blowing demos. Another technology available...
By David WalshJune 2, 2015
7 Essential JavaScript Functions
I remember the early days of JavaScript where you needed a simple function for just about everything because the browser vendors implemented features differently, and not just edge features, basic features, like addEventListener and attachEvent. Times have changed but there are still a few functions each developer should...

Incredible Demos

By David WalshMarch 31, 2009
MooTools & Printing – Creating a Links Table of Contents
One detail we sometimes forget when considering print for websites is that the user cannot see the URLs of links when the page prints. While showing link URLs isn't always important, some websites could greatly benefit from doing so. This tutorial will show you...
By David WalshDecember 17, 2012
CSS calc
CSS is a complete conundrum; we all appreciate CSS because of its simplicity but always yearn for the language to do just a bit more. CSS has evolved to accommodate placeholders, animations, and even click events. One problem we always thought...

Discussion

Hugo

Here’s what I use:

print("<link rel="icon" href="./favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />");
print("<link rel="shortcut icon" href="./favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />");

If you need to create a favicon from a jpg, gif, or png then head on over to http://www.favicon.cc/

Hugo
disregard the print command…I’m trying to figure out how to post code in the wmd. Sorry for the mistake.
Drefus
Thanx – I get a complete “overstanding” of the ideas
Drefus
Why doesn’t the link reference work for Chrome?

Avcreativecenter.com