Do You Still Need a favicon.ico File in 2026?

It's reasonable to assume .ico is dead. Modern sites declare their icons with <link> tags pointing at PNG and SVG files, and a format designed for Windows desktop shortcuts in the 1990s should have aged out by now.

It hasn't. A favicon.ico file at the root of your site is still worth shipping. The reason, though, isn't the one you'll read in most guides, including an earlier version of this one.

What browsers actually do

The common claim is that every browser requests /favicon.ico on every page load, whatever your HTML says. I tested this in Chrome with a local server that logged every request:

• On a page that declared <link rel="icon" href="/icon.png">, Chrome requested /icon.png and never asked for /favicon.ico.
• On a page with no icon tags, Chrome requested /favicon.ico.
• When I opened a JSON file and a PNG image directly, Chrome requested /favicon.ico for both.

So for browsers, /favicon.ico is a fallback. It's what they try when the document gives them nothing better, which is the convention Internet Explorer 5 introduced in 1999. Firefox behaves the same way. If every one of your pages declares its icons correctly, browsers will rarely touch the file.

Why you should still ship it

Plenty of software never reads your HTML

The long tail of things that display your site's icon is much bigger than browsers: feed readers, chat apps building link previews, bookmark managers, password managers, browser extensions, SEO tools and crawlers. Many of them skip your HTML entirely and request /favicon.ico directly, because it's the one location guaranteed to be meaningful on any domain. If it's missing, they show a blank square or a generic globe.

Not every page declares an icon

Error pages, admin areas, old templates, PDFs and API responses often have no icon tags. On every one of those, the browser falls back to /favicon.ico. Without the file, those pages show a generic icon in the tab, and your logs fill up with 404s. Our guide to the favicon 404 covers that in detail.

Big sites depend on it

When I audited 101 popular websites, six of them, including Apple, Reddit and Walmart, declared no icon tags at all. Their tab icon comes entirely from /favicon.ico. It's the oldest favicon mechanism on the web, and it's still load-bearing.

What to put inside it

ICO is a container, not really an image format. One .ico file can hold several sizes of the same icon, and the program reading it picks the one it needs. For a favicon, include three:

• 16×16 for browser tabs at standard resolution,
• 32×32 for high-density screens and the Windows taskbar,
• 48×48 for Windows desktop shortcuts.

You don't need anything bigger. Large sizes belong in your PNG icons and web manifest, where they're declared with explicit sizes. Of the 69 real ICO files in my audit, only four included a 256px image.

Keep it small

Most ICO files on the web are bigger than they need to be. 19 of the sites in my audit served a favicon.ico of exactly 15,086 bytes, which is what 16, 32 and 48px weigh as uncompressed bitmaps. Stored as compressed PNG data inside the ICO, which every current browser supports, the same three sizes of our logo came to 2,746 bytes.

Make sure it's really an ICO

15 of the 101 sites I audited served a PNG renamed to favicon.ico. Browsers display it fine, because they read the file's contents rather than trusting its extension. But a renamed PNG holds only one size, and some older tools that expect a real ICO won't read it. To check yours, run curl -s https://yoursite.com/favicon.ico | head -c 4 | xxd. A real ICO starts with 0000 0100. More ways to check a favicon.

How it fits with PNG and SVG

The three formats do different jobs:

• favicon.ico at the root covers the fallback request and any tool that only looks there.
• PNG icons, declared with <link rel="icon">, give browsers specific sizes, plus the 180×180 Apple touch icon and the 192 and 512px manifest icons.
• An SVG icon, if your mark is simple, stays sharp at any size and can adapt to dark mode.

Declare the ICO with sizes="32x32" so browsers that support SVG prefer the SVG:

<link rel="icon" href="/favicon.ico" sizes="32x32">
<link rel="icon" href="/icon.svg" type="image/svg+xml">

The format comparison goes deeper into how the three fit together, and the size guide lists every size you need.

The short version

Keep favicon.ico. Put it at the root of your domain, with 16, 32 and 48px images inside, stored as PNG data so it stays small. Then declare your modern icons on every page, so browsers rarely need the fallback. The converter builds a correct multi-size ICO, along with the rest of the set, from any logo.