When your website is custom designed, it’s standard practice for your web designer to create a ‘favicon.ico’ graphic to match your brand or overall design. They will install it for you so you don’t have to give your favicon another thought, unless you wish to change it yourself in the future.
What is a favicon.ico image?
- 16×16 (usual size)
- 32×32
The favicon is noted in your website theme or template code, which browsers find, pick up and use to display the image in the browser bar next to the title of the page being viewed.Default Favicon in Templates and Themes
If you’re using a web design template, a free blog theme, or even a premium WordPress theme, then it’s likely to have a default favicon already included with the files you’ll have uploaded to your hosting server.
A default favicon will have been designed to represent the template or theme developers’ brand, not your brand or your business.Is It Essential to Change Your Website Favicon?
You may prefer to change it to one that represents your own business brand or reflects your blog topic.
If that’s not a concern for you then it’s not essential to change your website favicon, simply leave the default icon in place and don’t worry about it. Although you may start noticing the same icon on other sites, now that you are aware of it.
How To Change Your Website Favicon Image
Before you can change your favicon, you’ll need to find where it’s located, in local files or on your hosting server. This will vary depending upon the type of website you have eg:
- handbuilt html or
- a CMS (content management system) such as WordPress.
Options
- If your WordPress (or other platform/framework) theme has a custom favicon option in the admin theme settings, you can actually upload a new ‘favourite icon’ in an alternative image format eg: .png or .jpg to override any default favicon.
- Ask your web designer if they will do this Free (or for a small fee) for you – Not all web designers change the default favicons for their client websites, which is a shame as it takes just a few minutes for a favicon to be created and uploaded at the web design stage.
- If you have an FTP (file transfer protocol) tool eg: filezilla and can use it, replace your favicon this way.
Alternatively, the video below will show you how to locate your favicon.ico in your website files on your web site server, and how to change it, via cPanel, no ftp tools required.
Although the video covers WordPress websites, the principle is the same for most self-hosted site types.
If your web designer hasn’t changed your default favicon, do give them a quick call. They’ll change it fairly quickly for you, if you ask and if they already have a brand item/graphic that they can edit or resize reasonably quickly for you!
Or, if you need some help with that contact me here.
