You may improve the loading speed of your website for each new visitor by optimizing the favicon. As a result, today we’ll discuss favicons and how to optimize them. So, before optimizing the favicon, let us first understand what the favicon is.

What is a favicon?

A favicon, often known as a favicon.ico file, is a little image icon linked to your website. A little 16×16 pixel icon that acts as your website’s identity. Its primary goal is to make it easier for users to find your page when they have many tabs open. Favicons perform best as simple images or one to three text characters due to their small size. The favicon.ico file is usually located at the root of your website.

Why is there a need to use Favicon?

The creation of a favicon is a small but crucial step in the process of putting up a business website. It lends credibility to your website and aids in the development of your online brand. As well as the confidence of potential customers. They serve as an immediate visual marker for the website, allowing online users to quickly identify it and unifying all other browser components into a well-branded surfing experience.

Favicon & SEO:

Favicons are not directly responsible for your Search Engine Optimization, but they are a valuable technique for increasing your search engine ranking. From the following points, you can know how Favicon is essential for SEO.

Adopting favicon results in a more user-friendly website and more significant usage. Having a user-friendly website increases your search engine rankings. Having a favicon displayed on your browser tabs, bookmarks, history archives, and other places saves time for your users by helping them to quickly identify and visit your website, boosting the possibility of user interaction. This will increase the time people spend on your website and their interactions with it, resulting in more views on your site for extended periods, enhancing your SEO.

You have an advantage over websites that do not have a favicon. Google’s Chrome browser deducts some search ranking signals for domains bookmarked on the web. If your website does not have a favicon, you may miss out on the potential of getting bookmarked in the Chrome browser, which is one of many search ranking indications. Also, getting bookmarked and then visually sticking out in that list of bookmarks due to favicons increases the likelihood of users revisiting your website. All of this improves the traffic and SEO of your website.

A favicon is a visual representation of your website and business, and the favicon you pick will help consumers recognize your brand. The more visible your website is, the more users will likely click on it and remember who you are. SEO is all about branding and marketing, and the more visible your website is, the more users are likely to click on it and remember who you are.

Now that you know how beneficial Favicon is, here are a few tips to optimize your Favicon.

Tips to optimize your website Favicon:

Make it simple:

Make sure your favicon is simple. This is because any complicated image requires extra storage space for color information. And location, so we must avoid designing complex icons. Because a symbol is so tiny, those minute features would be indistinguishable from the human eye.

Make it cacheable:

Because the need to change the favicon is infrequent, you should make it cacheable in the first go only. It could potentially reduce the number of times you have to reload the page or navigate to another internal page. You can use a new name for favicon files if you wish to update them and then modify the file name on the web page header. You can set the cache for years for PNG and SVG favicons. Because most browsers request this file name by default, you won’t be able to update it for your returning visitors until their cache expires, so you should specify the Expire header for /favicon.ico carefully.

Enable the GZIP compression:

A favicon.ico file containing all of the recommended resolutions can get huge. Therefore keeping it more minor is essential. Although most recent browsers support gzip compression, Apache HTTPD and NGINX do not compress ICO files by default. It would shorten the file if gzip compression were applied to the favicon.ico file, saving a lot of bandwidth and time.

Make an SVG favicon:

Most modern browsers support PNG favicons, and those browsers will only retrieve the PNG file that best suits your needs (usually, a single PNG file should be smaller than an ICO file). If your favicon is simple, there’s a format called SVG, smaller than PNG files. SVG, unlike PNG, has the advantage of being scalable without sacrificing quality. Making it the ideal design for a favicon because it can be stretched to numerous sizes while maintaining quality using a single file. Unfortunately, most browsers do not support SVG favicon; however, this may change shortly. Therefore prepping your site with an SVG favicon should improve loading times soon.