What Is a Favicon: How to Create One for Your Website?

When you open a website, you see a little icon or emblem on the left side of the tab. Have you ever wondered what it is? It’s called favicon. A tiny but useful thing that differentiates a website from all other websites opened on the browser.

But what exactly is the favicon? Why does almost every reputable website add to it? What are the benefits of using favicons? How to create a favicon easily? In this short but informative guide, we will answer all these questions. So, read it to the end, and you will learn everything about favicons.

Let’s dive in!

What is a Favicon?

Favicon is a short form of “favorite icon.” As mentioned earlier, it is a small icon that appears on the website tab. Plus, when someone bookmarks a website, it appears on it so that everyone can easily recognize it and open it whenever they want. Moreover, you can also find favicons on search results and history. 

The Favicon image works like a logo. In most cases, they are the logos of the brands, companies, or websites. However, in some cases, they are a bit different from the actual logos, but people can easily recognize them due to their similarities with the logos.

Benefits of Favicon

These short 16x16 pixels or, in some cases, 32x32 pixels square icons offer many benefits to users and website owners. Have a look at those benefits.

Brand Awareness

Favicons are essential for brand awareness. As you see, most companies use different variations of their logos and apply them to various things, including their products, marketing brochures, standees, social media posts, etc. Establishing a strong social media presence is vital for building a brand's reputation, which can build trust among potential clients, investors, and followers. Brand owners always use variations of logos to differentiate themselves from the sea of websites.

When someone searches for a particular thing on the internet and sees tons of results on their screen, they don’t need to read the domain name before opening any search result. Instead, when they see the favicon, they immediately recognize the platform and decide whether to open it or not. That’s how it helps with brand awareness.

Bookmark Identification

Many people bookmark websites or articles they want to revisit multiple times. Most of the time, they give some names to bookmarks to distinguish them from others. However, they can forget their names and need clarification. That’s where the favicons help them a lot. By watching the favicon, they can easily differentiate between different websites and open the one they want to visit. 

Visibility

Favicons also help a lot in making websites more visible. No matter whether a website appears lower on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages), if someone wants to open that particular website, they can easily recognize it through its favicon. They don’t need to open each website. Instead, the favicon can help them immediately locate the exact website. So, if you are a website owner and want to enhance your visibility, you must add favicons so that people can easily find and visit your website.

User Experience

These tiny icons improve the user experience by providing even minor details to the users and help them save time and find the websites they want to visit. Moreover, they also help them quickly find a particular website in the tab bar by just having a single look. So, from the users’ perspective, favicons are also important. Without them, it could be harder for them to locate the website they want to open.

How to Create a Favicon for Your Website?

In most cases, people choose their logos as favicons. However, in some cases, the exact logos cannot be used as favicons as the logos have different elements and typography. Using those logos as favicons is not useful at all. You may need to make a few changes to them to design a favicon. For instance, if you see Amazon’s logo and favicon, both differ. That’s why most people hire professional designers to create favicons.

Designers usually crop logos and use one element as a favicon. Moreover, they resize them and try to squeeze the favicons to make them look professional. However, they charge a lot for their services.

If you have designing skills, you can create favicons yourself. For that purpose, you need to crop the logo and make some changes to convert it into a favicon. Once you create a standard favicon, convert it into different dimensions for multiple platforms. You can use sophisticated design tools offering this feature to change the dimensions.

How SmallSEOTools Can Help You Generate Favicon?

Generating favicons manually is a technical task, and designers must consider multiple things while developing them. Moreover, it takes much time. Thankfully, SmallSEOTools has introduced its favicon generator that quickly creates favicons from images and helps designers save time.

To generate a favicon with SmallSEOTools’ favicon generator, users don’t need to compress files themselves or preserve their quality. Instead, they only need to upload the file in its actual size and dimensions and press the “Generate Favicon” button to start the processing. This tool takes only a few moments and generates a ready-to-use favicon that people can easily download by pressing the “Download” button. So, instead of creating it yourself or hiring a professional designer, utilize SmallSEOTools and save time and money.