Favicon
The tiny mark in the browser tab. Small, and oddly noticeable when it is missing or muddy.
What does Favicon mean?
The tiny icon in a browser tab, a bookmark, and sometimes a phone's home-screen shortcut, so your site is recognizable when the title is cut off.
Also called: browser icon, tab icon
Where it shows up
Open several tabs and the titles collapse. The favicon is what remains. It also appears in bookmarks and in some search features. It is not the header logo, though it is often drawn from the same mark.
A missing favicon shows a generic page icon. A favicon that is a photograph of a storefront becomes a smudge at that size. Simple shapes and a limited set of colors survive sixteen pixels better than a detailed illustration.
What to hand a designer
A square version of the mark, with some padding so it does not touch the edges, beats an automatic crop of a wide wordmark. If the business has only a wordmark, a single letter or a simple monogram is often clearer than shrinking the whole name.
We place the icon as part of launch. You do not buy a separate favicon package. If the brand mark changes later, replacing the icon is a small update. Tell us before you order new shirts, so the tab and the shirt agree.
A few avoidable mistakes
Do not upload a photo of the building and call it done. Do not use another company's icon because it looks professional. Do not forget the dark-browser case: a black mark on a transparent file disappears on a black tab.
Test by bookmarking the homepage and by looking at the tab next to your email. If you cannot tell them apart at a glance, the icon is not finished, even if the file exists.
An example
A barbershop's tab showed a white box because the icon was a white wordmark on transparency. Recoloring the mark and exporting a square with a solid ground made the bookmark recognizable next to a dozen other tabs on the owner's phone.
Questions we get asked
Is a favicon the same as a social share image?
No. The share image is the large picture some apps show when a link is pasted. The favicon is the tiny tab icon. You want both, and they are different crops.
Will it change my ranking?
No. It changes whether people recognize you in a row of tabs and bookmarks. That is worth doing, and it is not SEO.
