3 Reasons Why Your Business Website May Need a Favicon

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[UPDATE] There is now an easier way to add this favicon for wordpress.org users. Here’s how:

Click, “Appearance.”
Click, “Customize.”
Look for “Site Identity” and just follow the instructions there. Obviously, the image should be a square.

The Site Icon feature can be found by going to Appearance -> Customize and clicking on Site Identity.

The above is good news for us WordPress users!

What is Favicon? It is short for a favorite icon. It is that image you see preceding a website URL on a search bar, if not a title bar, on most web browsers. You could use any image; the smallest is 16×16 pixels. Here is what a favicon looks like on a search bar. Isn’t it neat? 🙂

Favicon Best Practices

Use your company logo and standard colors. Buyers tend to associate image and color to a company.
Do not use your photo. Or likeness of you, unless you are branding yourself. If you do, you may want to use the services of a pro photographer like *ahem* Photography by Ruby.
Keep it simple. Less is more.

3 Reasons your Business Website Needs the Favicon

Whether or not you need one is entirely up to you since your website will still function without it. If, however, you are a business using your website mainly as the virtual “storefront.” we recommend that you consider having one. Here are some of the reasons why:

When using a logo, it’s one way to maximize brand awareness. It’s for branding! The more ways people see your favicon, the more likely that your brand will be remembered. That’s memory recall in marketing. As an example, when you see people walking around with shoes and shirts emblazoned with this image (below), we know whose product they are wearing, right?
It is an indication for visitors to the company website that they are in the correct place. Having a favicon as the website “marker” is reassuring for site visitors. Here is an example for this website’s favicon on Firefox title bar.
It helps your website visitors (and you!) when bookmarking or favorite-ing your site. It is truly easy to find the website on a mobile device’s home screen or when bookmarking it on your Mac or PC with a favicon. We like saving our website on mobile devices so we can show it to potential clients when needed. We just quickly (!) look for the favicon. This is how it looks like on an iPad, and note, too, the placement for quick access.

This is how it looks like when bookmarked (I used Safari on this one). It stands out, doesn’t it?

Creating a Favicon

There are favicon apps that are available out there that you can use to create your company’s favicon, we’ve listed a few of them below. Please note that you will need some technical knowledge to add the favicon to your site. If that is all Greek to you, we strongly suggest that you leave the work to your web designer or anyone with web language knowledge. Here are the apps should you want to give it a try.