How to Create a Favicon for Your WordPress Blog

A favicon, short for ‘favorites icon,’ is the tiny icon that appears beside a web address in your browser, and it also appears beside saved bookmarks. A favicon helps to establish your website and your brand, and adding one to your WordPress blog provides a small but significant visual representation of your online presence. A favicon will typically be a brand logo or anything else that you regularly use to for identifying your various online resources. You can generate a favicon in most graphic design and editing programs, and for it to be displayed correctly, it should be 16×16 pixels and saved as favicon.ico. While there are numerous plugins that allow you to easily add a favicon to your WordPress blog, manually generating one is also a fairly simple process.

Using an FTP client (most hosting companies provide a web-based one that should be accessible from your account page), upload your favicon.ico file into the folder of your current theme. This folder will be located in wordpresswp-contentthemes.
Upload another copy of your favicon.ico file to the root directory of your FTP server, as this will allow the icon to appear in RSS feeds for your blog.
Login to your WordPress administrator dashboard and navigate to Appearance > Editor to edit your current theme.
Locate the Header template in the sidebar to the right and click on header.php.
Search for the line of code beginning with <link rel=”shortcut icon”. If this line does not exist, then add it just below the <head> HTML tag near the top of the page. Edit or enter the code so that it appears like this:
<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”/favicon.ico” />
Click “Update File” to save your changes.

How To Create A Favicon For Your Wordpress Blog

If you change your theme, you will need to repeat the above steps while also remembering to upload a copy of your favicon.ico file to the root directory of the new theme.
If you want to have a favicon with a transparent background, you need to use the PNG format and save your file as favicon.png.
If you prefer to use a plugin rather than using the manual method detailed above, you can do so using All in One Favicon, Multicons, or Captain Favicon among others.