// Technical SEO
Favicon Best Practices in 2026: Sizes, Formats, and Common Mistakes
Everything you need to know about favicons in 2026 — the right sizes, SVG vs PNG, manifest icons, and how to check if yours are set up correctly.
What favicons are actually used for
Favicons appear in browser tabs, bookmark managers, and — increasingly — in mobile SERP layouts where your favicon appears next to your page title.
The 'favicon' now encompasses a family of icons: browser tabs, iOS home screen icons, Android icons, Windows tiles, and PWA icons. Each has different size and format requirements.
The modern favicon setup
Minimum viable: a 32×32 PNG favicon.ico in your root and a 180×180 apple-touch-icon.png for iOS. Complete setup adds 192×192 and 512×512 PNG icons in your web app manifest, an SVG favicon for modern browsers, and proper meta tags.
SVG favicons scale perfectly and support dark mode via prefers-color-scheme. Supported by all modern browsers except Safari — so you still need the PNG fallback.
- favicon.ico: 32×32, root directory, legacy fallback
- apple-touch-icon.png: 180×180, for iOS home screen
- SVG favicon: infinitely scalable, supports dark mode
- 192×192 PNG: Android Chrome, declared in manifest.json
- 512×512 PNG: PWA splash screen, declared in manifest.json
Common favicon mistakes
Wrong path (not in root directory), missing apple-touch-icon, serving a large PNG when browsers expect specific sizes, incorrect MIME type, and forgetting to cache-bust when you update the favicon.
WebEnture's Favicon & Web App Agent checks all of these automatically — scanning for missing sizes, incorrect declarations, and manifest errors.