Make Favicon Small and Cacheable

Favicons, which is short for favorite icon, are the small, 16×16 pixel icons typically displayed in a website browser’s tab, however, they can be used in other places, like social media channels, bookmarks, website history, etc. The favicon is the visual representation that helps to identify your company’s brand or website, so they are really used to help users tie your company with a single image. Favicons are typically either created in JPEG or PNG formats and no larger than 32×32 pixels.

While favicons are typically lower on the list of priorities, most browsers today require one, so it is important that your organization have one to use across all your channels. If you do not have one, users will see a 404 Not Found error message because the favicon resides on the root directory on the server. So, making the favicon as small as possible, in terms of dimensions and file size, will help reduce the time it takes the root server to retrieve the cookies. Favicons can also be loaded from your CDN, to be loaded from a closer data center. Furthermore, your favicon is going to stay the same over longer periods of time, so setting the cache expiration as far out as possible will help with avoiding frequent requests and enhance page performance as well.