How to Set Your Site Icon (Favicon) in WordPress

One thing every WordPress site should have is a site icon, also called a “favicon”—the little tiny image that shows up in your browser tabs to let you tell one site from another. Ours at WPShout is a orange circle with a bullhorn inside it, so you which tabs are us. For the more visually-inclined, here’s a relevant summary image of a site icon:

A screenshot of the "Site Icon" (or favicon) feature of WordPress's Customizer
Image illustrating a site favicon taken from WordPress itself, because they illustrated it so well ☺️

This video Quick Guide walks you through how to change your WordPress site icon. It’s easier now than ever, because WordPress has embedded this feature right into the Customizer. And WordPress’s standard site icon uploading process has you covered for all the less common uses for favicons (such as serving as retina-ready desktop app icons if someone saves a shortcut to your site onto her iPad homescreen).

Here’s my video guide on how to set your site icon in WordPress:

And here’s our text guide to the same information:

How to Change the Site Icon of Your WordPress Site

  1. Collect the image that you’ll use as your site icon (if it’s not already on your WordPress site).
  2. Open the Customizer in WordPress. You can click “Customize” along the top bar (if you’re viewing pages on your site), or “Appearance > Customize” in the left-side menu (if you’re in your WordPress admin area).
  3. Open the “Site Identity” panel by clicking it from the initial listing panel.
  4. Open the “Site Icon” section. If it hasn’t been used before on your site you’ll click the “Select Image” button.
  5. There you will select an image already in your image library, or have the ability to upload a new one. (If you’ve ever used WordPress’s media library, this screen should be familiar.)
  6. You will have the ability to crop the image. If it was square, you’ll probably skip this by clicking “Crop Image” without resizing the selection box. (If you do need to crop, drag away.)
  7. With that, you’ll be set. Your browser tab may immediately update with the image. If it doesn’t, but you see something like this, you’re set:

    (Browser caching can be hard to debug, but refresh may fix it for you.) 🙂

And that’s how to change your WordPress site icon! Streamlining this process has been one of the default Customizer’s sweetest features. Let us know if you have any questions—we’re happy to help.


9 Comments
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Matt Slaga
May 29, 2021 5:32 pm

Perfect, just what I was looking for. Succinct and straight to the point. Thanks for posting!

Julie
April 17, 2021 3:19 pm

Many Thanks, this was driving me crazy! It looks fab now!

Andy
April 14, 2021 1:04 am

I always set two favicons. One for the frontend based on the site’s logo and a colour reverse of this for the backend. It helps distinguish where you are when you have multiple tabs open. I add code to the theme’s function.php file to do this and manually upload the various favicons and sizes into set folders within the theme.

Andy
June 8, 2021 12:59 am
Reply to  David Hayes

Ok, will do. Is that something you would want to publish on this site?

Kawangi
November 10, 2020 10:44 pm

Hey i can’t find site identity on my customised menu. Do you know if there’s another way?

Tapio
October 25, 2019 5:20 am

Is there any way to set favicon with PHP scripts and replace the default icon?

I would like to try create alarms and I would like in certain circumstances to replace the default icon with icon with exclamation sign.

Jessica
January 6, 2019 7:00 pm

I’ve tried uploading a site icon several times, however it will not appear. Although WordPress shows the site icon is saved, it does not appear in my browser. Do you think the issue is with the WordPress theme or WordPress itself?

I’ve also resized the picture to meet the requirements.

Jill
September 29, 2018 12:37 pm

Brilliant! Thank you.