A favicon, short for favorite icon, is a small icon file, most commonly 16 x 16 pixels, associated with a particular website.
A browser that supports favicon (most commonly has a .ico file extension) typically displays it next to the address bar or next to the page’s title. See image below.
It might be just a very small icon file, but it helps to differentiate your website from your competitors and makes your website looks professional and trust worthy.
See image below to find out the difference between sites with and without a favicon in my browser’s bookmark.
Just look at those big sites such as Amazon, Google, Facebook or etc., all of them have their own favicons to further establish their brand identity on the web.
Anyway, creating a favicon isn’t really difficult, with so many online favicon generators around, there’s no excuse not to have one on your site.
In this post, I’m going to show you a list of online resources that can be used to generate a favicon effortlessly. While there are few come with amazing features, allowing you to create borders or an animated version, but most of them are pretty standard with only upload and convert feature.
And which one to choose it’s entirely up to you own preference.
Online Favicon Generators
http://www.favicon.cc/ – (My personal favourite)
You can either import existing image or create a favicon from scratch. When you’re importing an image for conversion, you can either use the color or animation tools to further customize the image.
A preview window is available to see the customization instantly.
http://favicon.htmlkit.com/favicon/.
This is a feature-rich favicon generator. Some of the features offered by this site are the capability to generate animated favicon, iPhone/iPod/iPad icon, add borders, convert to greyscale and etc.
http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/
A pretty straight-forward generator, upload and convert the image to .ico file. You can either upload a gif, jpg, png or bmp file.
http://www.favicongenerator.com/
Another upload and convert favicon generator.
http://www.favicon.co.uk/
A simple to use favicon generator, upload a file from your computer, choose the desired size and download the .ico file.
http://favicon-generator.org/
With this tool, you can either create a favicon from scratch or import existing image for conversion.
http://www.favikon.com/
This tool allows you to upload an image, crop it and select either to download the .ico or png file.
http://favigen.com/
Upload the image, choose a dimension and download the favicon file.
4 online favicon generators on Chinese sites
Just in case you fancy a Chinese version, below is the list of 4 favicon tools on Chinese websites.
www.ico.la
Upload an image file, and then select the size to download the favicon file. You can either choose 128 x128, 64 x 64, 48 x 48, 32 x 32 or 16 x 16.
http://www.damotou.com/
Upload an image file and get converted to .ico file in 3 different sizes, 16 x 16, 32 x 32, and 128 x 128 instantly. Click the preferred size to download.
http://free.logomaker.cn/tools/icoMaker.aspx
It generates either 16 x 16 or 48 x 48 .ico file.
http://www.dyunr.com/Query/chagj/174.html
This tool supports PNG, JPG and GIF, and converts the image file into 16 x16, 32 x 32 or 48 x 48 .ico file.
This list is by no means exhaustive, if you’re using an online favicon generator that isn’t listed above, do let me know in the comments.