Favicon in WordPress

Daniel here with a real quick post about favicons in your WordPress site.

From a support mail received today, this is a quick post about adding a favicon to a WordPress site.

Generally speaking, you can make an icon file up in most decent graphics packages but you must save it correctly as a .ico file and preferably with the default favicon name: favicon.ico which should be 16×16 pixels in size.

Simply upload it to the root of your site and let a little time take it’s course, speeded up by ‘refresh’ F5 (quickly followed by ‘CTRL + F5′ when ‘F5′ on its own didn’t work).

Sometimes there are some issues that may affect favicon scripts, not the least being a lack of a favicon script in the themes. This is quite rare now but to rectify this, you need to add a tiny piece of code which will find the favicon file and display it.

The basic code is: 

Just copy that into the header.php file.  Anywhere will work, but preferably somewhere nearer the top so it doesn’t get bogged down with too many other scripts above it. Some will say it should go right at the top while others argue that it should be at the bottom… We think; it really doesn’t matter – as long as it is not entered inside another script loop which would prevent that code from working.

Don’t forget to change the favicon URL, (the text in red) or it won’t work!

You may still need a few [F5] refreshes to get the browser to pick up the script.  Clearing internet cache usually works first time.

If you are really stuck, or don’t fancy messing around with your php files, you can always fall back on a plugin to do the job.  There are loads available.

Regards
Daniel
WebMorf admin