Making a favicon: PNG or JPG to ICO
2026-10-06
A favicon is the small icon shown in a browser tab, in bookmarks and in history. The traditional format is ICO, and browsers still look for a file called favicon.ico at the top level of a site when a page does not say otherwise.
Prepare the image first
- Make it square. Favicon slots are square. A non-square image is not cropped by the converter: it keeps its shape, so a wide logo becomes a wide, short icon that browsers then squeeze or pad. Crop to a square before converting.
- Start large. 256 × 256 pixels or more is ideal. A small source is enlarged to fit, which makes it blurry.
- Keep it simple. The icon is usually displayed at 16 or 32 pixels. A single letter or a simple shape survives; a full logo with text does not.
- Use transparency if you want it. A PNG with a transparent background keeps it in the ICO.
What the ICO from this site contains
| Property | Value |
|---|
| Images inside | One |
| Size | The source resized to fit within 256 × 256, keeping its shape |
| Encoding | PNG-compressed, 32-bit colour with transparency |
| Quality setting | No effect: the image is stored losslessly |
ICO files can hold several sizes at once, classically 16, 32 and 48 pixels, so that each is drawn by hand for its size. The file produced here holds a single 256-pixel image and lets the browser scale it down. That is fine for a website favicon in any current browser. If you need a multi-size icon for a Windows application, use a dedicated icon editor.
Steps
- Convert with PNG to ICO or JPG to ICO.
- Rename the download to
favicon.ico. - Upload it to the top-level folder of your site, next to the home page.
- Add the link tag inside
<head> on your pages:
<link rel="icon" href="/favicon.ico" sizes="any">
Browsers find /favicon.ico on their own, but the tag removes any doubt and is required if the file lives in a different folder.
Starting from an SVG
SVG to ICO is not offered directly. Convert SVG to PNG first, then the PNG to ICO. The PNG is drawn at the size written in the SVG file, so if it comes out small, increase the width and height in the SVG and convert again.
The new icon does not show up
Browsers cache favicons aggressively, often for days. Before assuming the file is wrong:
- Open
yoursite.com/favicon.ico directly in the address bar. If the new image appears there, the file is correct. - Reload the page with the cache bypassed (Ctrl+Shift+R, or Cmd+Shift+R on a Mac), or open it in a private window.
Going the other way
To pull the image out of an existing icon, use ICO to PNG. If the icon holds several sizes you get one image from it, not all of them.
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