Luke Carbis

I remember when Favicons first started to appear. It’s so nice to reminisce on the development of the internet.

We should start this post with this: What’s a favicon?

The favicon is the little icon that appears alongside the address bar in most browsers, looks like this:

They make your site look that much better, more professional.

Next question: How do I get a favicon?

There are heaps of online tools to help you create your own favicon. Here’s a good one. Otherwise, a Google search will do. Once you have it, your favicon will be a small .ico file. I like to call mine favicon.ico.

The hard part: How do I get it to work for my wordpress site?

It’s not actually that difficult, thankfully. We’ll start by connecting to our FTP server, and opening up our wordpress folder. In my case, that’s /blog.

From here, we’ll open the wp-content folder, then themes. Next, open the folder for the theme that you’re using.

It’s here that we’ll upload that favicon.

Once uploaded we’re going to edit the file named header.php, which is just in this same theme folder.

Look for the line:

</head>

and just one line above it, paste this text:

<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”favicon.ico”>

Now my favicon was called favicon.ico, but if you called yours something different, just change the code above to reflect that. Then just save and re-upload the header.php, and we’re done.

Simple as that! If you get stuck, leave your question in the comments.

1. Chris Jones Says:
   February 5th, 2008 at 3:10 am

   Thanks for the wonderful tutorial. I plan on using it either today or tomorrow to create a favicon for my site. Also good luck with the 31 day challenge.

2. Chris Jones Says:
   February 5th, 2008 at 4:20 am

   Hey Luke, it’s not working, I followed your instructions exactly but it isn’t making the favicon show in the browser.

3. Luke Says:
   February 5th, 2008 at 7:18 am

   Hi Chris,

   I had a look at your website, and you’re experiencing a strange and weird problem to do with text encodings.

   Try downloading the header.php file to your computer, then editing it with notepad, and instead of copy/pasting, try typing out the text. This will ensure that the text encoding you are using is correct.

   The problem has to do with the editor you’re using. I experienced the same problem, a little while ago.

4. Chris Jones Says:
   February 6th, 2008 at 5:19 am

   I finally got it to work, thanks again.

5. Dan Says:
   September 5th, 2008 at 4:41 am

   Hey good advice. I use SM Favicon Generator. This one works great and its fast.

6. Rich Says:
   October 25th, 2008 at 7:19 pm

   hmm I followed as spell out also to no avail any more tips?

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