With so many websites competing for attention, your own site’s branding can mean the difference between success and failure. If you’re serious about branding your business, favicons are the little but very important elements of your marketing strategy. They’re just seemingly tiny elements, but it’s presence like this increase your website visibility and ensure you’re remembered by potential customers and stand out from the competition.
A Favicon image can help your webpage stand out in a congested bookmarks tab.
Let’s explore how they can boost your marketing efforts.
Enhance Branding
Fastening the branding on your website involves bringing a number of different pieces together to form an intuitive website as a whole. Favicons at WordPress site can be considered as one of the important elements and they should always be recognizable, simple, and consistent.
An effective Favicon can help visitors remember your company and your site. Even if they forget company name or website url, you can let them to be able to associate the Favicon with your company when they see it in the future.
And the more places that your favicon appears to site users, the better. With this approach, visitors will begin to connect your Favicon image with your WordPress site in general.
People use websites in more ways today, as compared to earlier days of the web. Some of us still bookmark webpages, some of us add websites to the home screen and use them like quick links, some of us use history tab to revisit the website links.
The reason why consistency is so important with your favicon is that many people open multiple tabs in the same browser which leads to less space for your website text descriptions on its open tab. In that case, the only display space available is for the favicon.
Improved User Experience
Favicons act as memorable visual leads to your website, enhancing user experience. Since they help users easily identify your website tab on their browser and across different places, such as the bookmark bar, history tab, a favicon always makes it easier for users to revisit your website.
While your visitors probably can’t define exactly what favicons are or how they work, the favicon icons are still very familiar to them. In fact, they are so familiar to website users that sites lacking a favicon will stand very low chance of getting recognized by the visitors.
Similarly, to secure site connections and relevant social media content, favicons are a critical piece of the puzzle that boosts visitors’ confidence in your WordPress website.
Consistency on Mobile Devices
Favicons can also have a positive impact on the user experience when it comes to mobile. Web design on mobile is all about making an impact, and many times, nothing does that more powerfully, or easily, than a great favicon.
As most of us now understand, we can no longer ignore the huge impact that mobile devices have made on user habits. In fact, tablets and smartphones now ruling over desktop devices in terms of number of times, visitors coming online.
Using the right favicon enables your website branding easily translates to all mobile devices. And when a user creates bookmarks to your site on their mobile home screens, the favicon you use will be displayed rather than a link.
Enabling Favicons on WordPress
Now it’s time to get your WordPress favicon loading and running on your website, you can use, one of the following options to get your favicon active.
- Use the customize feature on WordPress to upload your Favicon
- Use WordPress Plugin to Install a Favicon
- Manually upload Your WordPress Favicon
Let’s dive deep into the options.
1. Use the customize feature on WordPress to upload your Favicon
As per WordPress version 4.3 & above, all WordPress sites include a site icon feature that will enable website administrator to upload an image to use as a favicon. This is the easiest and quickest method for adding a favicon icon to WordPress.
All you need to do is to get an image file as per the defined specification, which can be .ico, .jpeg, .png, or .gif. Rest of process will be handled by WordPress. To get started, navigate to the Administrator area of your WordPress website and click on ‘Appearance’ Link then click on ‘Customize’ Link. After navigate to the ‘Site Identity’ Tab.
After this, click on ‘Select Image’ link under the ‘Site Icon’ section, then upload your Favicon file.
If you’re satisfied with the favicon preview, then it’s done, otherwise you’ll need to do adjustments as per your requirements. The favicon started loading each time you and your website visitors navigate to your site.
If you don’t like the Favicon or want to change your favicon in the future, you can come back to this interface. That’s it! All you need to do is to upload a new Favicon as per your business branding.
2. Use WordPress Plugin to Install a Favicon
Instead of using the customize Site Icon feature of WordPress, you can also explore the plugin to apply your favicon to your website. One of the most popular plugin is RealFaviconGenerator and it does a great job to upload Favicons with no hassles. Plus, these type of plugins offers additional integrated features for various devices and app icons. You can install and activate the free plugin from your WordPress dashboard.
If you are not comfortable using the customize Site Icon feature of WordPress, then this is a must-have plugin because it does more than simply uploading your favicon. The plugin also ensures that multiple favicon versions are created as per the requirements of different user devices and operating systems.
You just have to ensure that the image you’re using for your favicon is, off proper size i.e. minimum, 70 x 70 pixels in size. Rest, RealFaviconGenerator will automatically take care of everything else for you.
3. Manually upload Your WordPress Favicon
If you’d prefer to do things manually, it’s possible to add a favicon to your WordPress site through direct uploading of the Favicon file via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or File Manager if your host uses cPanel. In this case, you have to create and upload your own favicon directly to your WordPress website.
To get started, you have to create a favicon image that is at least 16 x 16 pixels. Then you can save this file as a .ico, .jpeg, .png, or .gif file.
After this, you can upload your file directly into the root directory of your site. This will be the same place as your wp-content and wp-admin folders.
While this process should immediately display your new favicon on most of the web browsers being used today, some of the older versions of browsers, you have to tweak the HTML code in the WordPress header.
Make sure to save your changes. Then you’re all done!
We don’t recommend doing DIY favicons unless you’re technically sound and very familiar with the WordPress environment.
Summary
Strong and unique branding can help you establish connections and trust with your existing & potential customers. In other words, a WordPress favicon can definitely boost your brand recognition and improve the user experience for your website’s visitors. Fortunately, Favicon is one of the true soldier in that area.
