Favicon Checker
Verify your website's favicon is present, correctly configured, and displays properly across all browsers.
What is Favicon Checker?
A favicon is the small icon associated with a website that appears in browser tabs, bookmarks, history lists, and on mobile home screens when a user saves a shortcut. While favicons have no direct SEO ranking impact, they significantly affect brand recognition and user experience — a distinctive favicon helps users identify your tab among 20 others and reinforces brand identity. Modern favicon implementation is more complex than the single 16×16 favicon.ico of the early web: devices now require multiple sizes and formats for different contexts. An iPhone home screen shortcut needs a 180×180 PNG (apple-touch-icon), Android Chrome needs a 192×192 and 512×512 PNG defined in a Web App Manifest, and modern browsers prefer SVG favicons that scale perfectly. Missing or broken favicons cause a 404 request for every page load on your site — wasting server resources and showing up in error logs. This tool checks that all favicon formats are correctly implemented and accessible.
How to Use Favicon Checker
- 1
Enter Your Website URL
Paste your website's homepage URL. The tool fetches the page, reads all favicon-related HTML tags, and checks that each referenced favicon file is accessible.
- 2
See All Favicon Formats
View a checklist of favicon types: ICO, 16×16 PNG, 32×32 PNG, 180×180 Apple Touch icon, 192×192 and 512×512 Android icons, SVG favicon, and Web App Manifest — with pass/fail for each.
- 3
Fix Missing or Broken Favicons
Each missing or broken favicon type is flagged with the specific HTML tag needed to implement it, making it straightforward to add missing icons to your page's <head>.
Use Cases
New Website Launch Checklist
Favicons are often forgotten during website launches — they work in the developer's browser (where it's cached) but generate 404 errors in production. Including a favicon check in your pre-launch checklist takes 30 seconds and prevents unnecessary 404 errors from the moment the site goes live.
Mobile App and PWA Setup
Progressive Web Apps and sites that support "Add to Home Screen" on mobile require specific Apple Touch icons and Android manifest icons with exact pixel dimensions. This tool verifies all required icon sizes are present and correctly referenced in both the HTML head and the Web App Manifest.
Brand Consistency Audit
After a rebranding or logo update, verify that all favicon files across your web properties have been updated to the new brand mark. A common oversight is updating the homepage's favicon.ico but forgetting to update the apple-touch-icon or the manifest icons, resulting in inconsistent branding across different contexts.
Features
Multi-Format Validation
Checks ICO, PNG (multiple sizes), SVG, Apple Touch Icon, and Android manifest icons — covering all the favicon types required by modern browsers and devices.
HTTP Status Verification
Verifies that each favicon file URL returns a 200 status code and appropriate Content-Type header — detecting favicons declared in HTML but missing from the server.
Web App Manifest Check
Reads your site's manifest.json (if present) and verifies that the icon entries it references are accessible with the correct sizes and formats for PWA compliance.
Visual Preview
Shows a visual preview of your favicon at the sizes used in browser tabs (16×16), taskbars (32×32), and mobile home screens (180×180) so you can verify it looks correct at each size.
Frequently Asked Questions
Favicons have no direct effect on search rankings. However, they affect user experience in ways that indirectly influence SEO metrics. A recognisable favicon in browser tabs increases brand recall, making users more likely to return to your site (improving return visitor rates). In Google's mobile search results, your favicon appears next to your URL — a branded, professional favicon enhances your listing's appearance and can improve click-through rates. Missing favicons generate unnecessary 404 requests that appear in Google Search Console's crawl errors, adding noise to your technical SEO monitoring.
The modern best practice is to provide multiple formats for different contexts: ICO for the legacy favicon.ico (which browsers fall back to even without HTML declaration), PNG for specific sizes (32×32 for browser tabs, 180×180 for Apple Touch), and SVG for modern browsers that support scalable icons. SVG favicons (implemented as <link rel="icon" type="image/svg+xml">) are ideal because they scale perfectly to any size and support dark/light mode variants via CSS media queries inside the SVG. A pragmatic approach: provide a favicon.ico at the root, a 32×32 PNG, and an SVG with the apple-touch-icon PNG.
Browser favicon caching is aggressive and inconsistent. A favicon that appears in one browser but not another is usually a caching issue rather than an implementation problem — clear the browser cache (Ctrl+Shift+R or hard reload) to force re-fetching. If the favicon still doesn't appear after clearing cache, check that the favicon file is at the path referenced in your HTML and returns a 200 status with the correct Content-Type (image/x-icon for ICO, image/png for PNG). Some browsers also ignore favicons on localhost or HTTP pages.
The apple-touch-icon is a PNG image (typically 180×180 pixels) used when an iOS user saves your website as a shortcut on their iPhone or iPad home screen. Without it, iOS uses a screenshot of the page as the icon — which looks terrible at small sizes. It is declared in HTML as <link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="180x180" href="/apple-touch-icon.png">. Despite the "apple" name, Android Chrome also falls back to apple-touch-icon if manifest icons are not specified. Given that a significant portion of web traffic comes from iOS devices, the apple-touch-icon is one of the more important favicon formats to have correct.
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