At the time of website creation, many people tend to neglect a few finishing touches that make a huge impact. One such finishing touch for a website is a favicon. It is a tiny addition to your website design that provides a better user experience. Despite its tiny size, it leaves a lasting impression on website visitors. Therefore, you must not underestimate the importance of favicon.
What is a Favicon?
Favicons are the small square images, which are often displayed just before the URL in the browser’s address bar. Just look for it on the browsing tabs and next to the website name in the bookmarks of the user list. These are the brand or website logo that’s reduced to around 16 x 16 pixels. It can be any image or icon that represents your brand
Favicon is a short term for “favourite icon,” which was actually featured in the Internet Explorer browser during 1999. When the users bookmark a website via Internet Explorer, they display the icon in the favourite’s list, next to the website.
All thanks to a favicon image, your website page stands out from other congested websites in a bookmark tab.
Importance of Favicon
If you are wondering what’s the importance of a favicon? Well, making a favicon is a tiny step towards setting up your entire business website. It helps in adding up legitimacy to a website and helps in boosting online branding and the trust of potential consumers. These are also the instant visual markers of a website, enabling quick and easy identification for web users. Meanwhile, it unifies all the browser components to offer an amazing branded browsing experience.
Are Favicons Vital for SEO?
While favicons are not responsible for search engine optimization (SEO) directly, these are responsible indirectly as an essential tool for enhancing your website ranking on different search engines.
Here are some ways how a favicon is useful for SEO:
1. User-Friendly Websites With Favicon Improve Search Engine Rankings:
When you have a user-friendly website, it indirectly helps in enhancing your search engine rankings. With a visible favicon on your bookmarks, browser tabs, and history archives, you can save time by identifying a website by the icon without any problem. This is how it increases more chances of user interaction with a website. It further improves user interactions and their time spent on a website. This simply means that users will spend more time on your website for a longer duration. Hence, SEO improves when more visitors get drawn to your site.
2. Bookmarks:
Another importance of a favicon is that it provides your a benefit over other websites that are not using one. The Chrome browser provides some search ranking signals for different websites bookmarked on the internet. But if our website is missing a favicon, you may miss out on your chances of getting bookmarked on Google Chrome. This further misses out on your indirect chances of getting some search ranking signals. Furthermore, when someone bookmarks a site, it visually stands out in a bookmark list due to a favicon. This is how it gives a better position and user revisiting opportunities to your website. Due to all this, your website traffic and SEO get increased to a great extent.
3. Favicon For Better Visibility and Branding:
Since a favicon is an icon or visual representation of your online business and website, users are likely to identify with your brand with it. As SEO is also all about branding and digital marketing, the more visible your website is, the more visitors are likely to click on it and remember your brand.
How to Create a Favicon For a Website
Now that you’re aware of the importance of a favicon, you must know how to create it for your website. Given below are the four easy steps to help you create a favicon for your website:
Step 1: Create Image For Favicon
You can make a favicon image by using any editor of your choice. You can choose Fireworks, Corel Paint, Photoshop, or a free, open-source alternative, such as GIIMP.
For easy brand identity, many companies use a simple company logo. To make it convenient to edit, you got to work with a 64 x 64-pixel square. After that, you can scale down to 16 x 16 pixels later. After that, you have to save your file as .png, .jpg, .bmp, .gif, or .tif.
Step 2: Convert the Image
When you are happy with the created image, you have to save it as favicon.ico. It is a suggested format that’s supported by almost all web browsers. For converting your file to .ico format, you have to use an online tool. You may use any of these tools – faviconer.com, iconifier.net, and prodraw.net.
Once you have download the desired tool, just upload an image, pick icon size, and further download your new .ico file.
Step 3: Upload Image on a Website
After that, you have to upload the .ico file needs to the root directory of the website. After that, the image must be visible whenever you visit www.yoursite.co.uk/favicon.ico.
Step 4: Don’t Forget Basic HTML Code
For helping older browsers look for your specific favicon image, you need to edit the HTML page of your website.
Modern browsers are likely to identify your favicon file without any code. But to ensure that it’s perfectly displayed on all browsers, you have to add HTML code to the header in the tags of a web page:
Making a favicon for your brand or company is a very simple and easy way to enhance your online branding. It also makes a huge difference to the user experience while improving your company’s overall image at no extra cost or for a very little price.
Conclusion
Now you must be well-aware of the importance of a favicon for a web design. It can help you improve your visitor experience, make your website appear more credible, and strengthen your brand identity. So, never make a mistake to neglect them, especially when they are very easy to create and add to your website. All you need is a free favicon creator tool and some knowledge of basic HTML coding.