I’ve been seeing a ton of Favicon issues lately and thought that might be a good topic for a lot of you since most businesses have a website, even a small one.
If you know what a Favicon is, you can skip this paragraph. For everyone else, a Favicon is that teeny tiny little logo that shows up in the tab of your web browser to help you identify the site of the tab since we all have lots of tabs open at any one time. But the Favicon also shows up in Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page), in your bookmarks, and a few other places, just to keep you on your toes.
Favicon files are rarely crawled by Google, so if you have an error, it may not show up right away and on the flip side of that… if you fix it, the fix won’t show right away which can be immensely frustrating. Favicon errors, to me, are like showing your cards at the game table. Why? Because the default is often the CMS (Content Management System) default. So, if I see the Favicon for Salesforce on Expertise.com (which it currently is), then I know Expertise uses Salesforce either as their CMS or as their CRM (Customer Relationship Manager tool). Salesforce is a funny one because they were originally a CRM that grew into a CMS. Want to see what I mean? Go to expertise.my.site.com/abcd and it will spit you out not on a 404 message branded by Expertise, but as a force.com site error and the Favicon in the tab? The blue cloud of Salesforce. So, I would say Expertise likely uses force.com for their CMS and Salesforce for their CRM. This is what I mean by ‘showing your cards at the game table.’ That’s more information than most businesses want a consumer to have.
By the way, I found all of this because I received a recognition from Expertise this year and went to update my profile. Expertise.com will have their diamond pattern logo for a favicon, but this page for a logged-in user reveals everything just by their Favicon.
And I know I’m not the average consumer for a web business; however, I see posts on Reddit all the time about broken Favicons and people speculating on what it means. For example, Graco Baby is showing the Demandware favicon right now. It looks like the power button which is identical to the shape of the GameStop logo. On Reddit, people are talking on GME forums (GameStop stock exchange stuff) about the possibility that the company that owns Graco Baby, Oster, and a few others who have this same Favicon failure is going to be purchased by GameStop. No, it’s just a Favicon error that shows these websites use Demandware (which was purchased by Salesforce – so a trend here in the errors we’ve explored so far).
Ok, so hopefully you’re starting to see the problem with broken Favicons. But wait… it gets worse. When your Favicon is broken and showing in Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page), people don’t think it’s safe to click because the logo they are expecting to see isn’t there. They wonder if this website is really the official website of the brand they are looking for. I’ve seen clicks drop around 30% during a ‘Favicon outage’ because consumers just aren’t sure it’s safe to click. And remember what I said earlier about the updates to a Favicon taking time? Right, so if you fix it, you still might have to wait a while to get your clicks back. Ouch!
Here are some tips to check your Favicon to see if it is broken:
- Open a web browser in Incognito mode or use a browser you never use, then conduct a Google search for your brand plus the word website. When you see yourself in the results, is the logo the one you want? Next, click that result and look at the tab at the top of the browser. Same question.
- If you still aren’t sure what will show up, you can look at the root directory where your Favicon *should* live. Going to yourwebsitename.com/favicon.ico should give you the image file of your logo. It might be tiny, but don’t worry about that right now.
- Still, still not sure? Or maybe that .ico file link came back with an error? Check your sourcecode and search (CTRL+F) for “favicon” and you should find it pretty quick.
What if your Favicon is broken?
- It should be a .ico file type (.svg is good, too) and it should live in the root of your domain (meaning .com/favicon.ico and not .com/images/folders/favicon.ico). There are online tools that can make a .ico file for you or I use Photoshop for more control.
- Add the file to your root directory. Don’t have any idea how? Go to the resources of your CMS (Content Management System) and look for steps on how to do this. For example, if your CMS is WordPress, search for “update Favicon in WordPress” and you’ll find a few tutorials. Hint – it’s almost always hiding in the main site settings for a CMS.
I fixed it, now what?
- Depending on the authority of your site, it can be a six-week wait for this to get updated. The more often you get crawled by Google, the better your chances of it being fixed sooner.
- Don’t want to wait for Google to figure out this change on their own? Go to Google Search Console (where they moved the Webmaster tools) and submit both your homepage AND the location of your Favicon file to Google and ask for a priority crawl for each. This will help.
This blog was a bit high on the technical skills scale. The key takeaway if you’re not a technically inclined person? Check your Favicon right now while the errors are high and again every few months. If it’s broken, search for or ask someone for help. It’s a costly error to have if you think about losing 30% of your organic traffic.