Everything to know about Favicons

You need a favicon if you have a website. For those who are not familiar with favicons, these are small square sized images that are associated with your websites. These are either a part of your logo, a alphabetical letter or any other thing related to your website. Favicons are appeared in all places like browser tools, bookmarks, address bars and tabs. Most popular browsers like opera, firefox, internet explorer and more are associated with favicons. Some examples are displayed as in image below.

Size of a Favicon

Images for favicons should be 16×16 pixels. You can also resize an existing photo, or generate a small image specifically for use as a favicon. When resizing a bigger photo to be this small, you may often lose essential details or end up with a fuzzy image. To avoid this, you will likely want to do some touch-up work after downsizing the larger photo. Or, just start with a 16×16 picture to avoid resizing issues on the whole.
 
What to show

Since you only have 256 pixels to work with, it can be a slightly challenging to know what to comprise in a favicon. Here are some common ideas:

• Use your logo or a part of it
• Use a stylized version of the first letter of your business name or site, If your logo doesn’t show well at such a small size
• Use an icon that communicates what your site does or represents (for example, Google Analytics uses a tiny chart for their favicon)

Image Format

As it is known as icon, so the image format for favicons must be .ico.   In the past, it was aggravate to convert into this format. However, thanks to easy and free services, this is no longer the case. All you need to do is create a 16×16 image. The .ico format supports transparency, so you’re not limited to creating a square icon. If you want to take benefit of transparency, use the .gif or .png format when creating your image.

Miscellaneous notes

• Remember Internet Explorer does not play well with .png favicons image forma
• Internet Explorer 5 may only recognize favicons that are named “favicon.ico”.
• Internet Explorer 6 may only support the .ico format for favicons.

Please share Favicon Checker tools in comments box below. Thanks for reading.