If you didn't know, a favicon is that little icon that appears both in your bookmarks in your web browser, your tabs in your web browser, and next to your navigation bar for whichever website you are on.
Adding a favicon to your website is a smart thing to do for a number of reasons. For one thing, adding a customized favicon significantly improves upon the level of professionalism for your website and company which people associate with it. It's another part of your branding which you should definitely not neglect.
Secondly, using a favicon on your website also separates your website from everyone else's. Not only does it help to differentiate your site from other bookmarks which someone might make within their web browser, it also puts you a leg up upon any website without an icon. Finally, it's also extremely simple to add a favicon to your website, so there's no reason to not do it.
Now that I've outlined what exactly a favicon is and why it is important to have one on your website, let's talk about how to add a favicon.
First off, you have to design your icon. Your favicon should be 16 pixels by 16 pixels in height and width. You can create an icon using your graphic designer of choice. I personally prefer Adobe Illustrator but I know a lot of people like to use Photoshop.
You can even get by using Paint which is a free program which comes with Windows. If you have an existing graphic or logo for your company, you might think about shrinking that or taking a piece of it in particular and shrinking that and making that your icon if you don't feel like creating one from scratch. If nothing else you might just take the initials of your company and write them in a flashy font.
Once your icon has been created, you should save it as a .ICO file. If you are having trouble with this, you can save it as a JPEG, GIF, or PNG file and then convert it with one click using a free service which I cannot link to here but will link to a mention of it at the end of this article. This service will churn out the exact file which you need for your website.
Now that we've designed our icon and rendered it down to an icon file, all that's left to do is publish it on our website. After we have uploaded this file using either an FTP program or your WordPress theme if your theme has a custom area for uploading your icon file, the changes will take place immediately and you'll see your icon in your browser.