How to Add Your Favicon to Blogger Update

Google/Blogger broke the instructions in the previous post about how to add your own favicon to a blogspot blog by adding some HTML that referenced the Blogger.com favicon instead. Fortunately the fix for this is relatively simple. Here is what has happened.

Blogger.com has added their own HTML to the templates near the top referencing their favicon. It looks like this if you look at the source code.

<link href='http://www.blogger.com/favicon.ico' rel='icon' type='image/vnd.microsoft.icon'/>

The instructions on How to Add Your Favicon to Blogger in step three says to add your own HTML code referencing your favicon right below the <head> tag. The web browser however will use the last reference so the Blogger.com favicon code was coming later on. The fix for this is to place your favicon code just before the closing <head> tag that looks like this: </head>.

Your code referencing your custom favicon then overrides the Google/Blogger.com code for the favicon and your custom favicon will return.

I tested this on the Free Favicon Blogspot blog and the favicon has returned. Give it a try on your Blogspot blog and let me know if it works.

How to Add Your Favicon to Blogger

Update: Blogger has improved and these instructions are no longer needed.

** Please see our new post on how to add your favicon to Blogger blogs. **

Blogger.com is one of the most popular blogging platforms on the Internet, yet if you have a blog with them you are often stuck with the default Blogger.com favicon. Hard to brand your blog with your own personal touch when you have the Blogger.com favicon on the address bar. If people bookmark your blog they won’t see your favicon and might quickly forget about your website. There is no reason why you can’t change the favicon on your Blogger.com blog to one of your own design. You just need to follow these easy steps and soon your Blogger.com blog will sport your great new custom made favicon.

  1. First thing you need to do is create your own custom made favicon. In this case you do not have to use an image to favicon generator, but your image should be either a .gif or a .png. In you example we are going to use a .png file. If you are not sure what kind of image to use browse through some of the free favicons that we offer, perhaps there will be one there that you would like to use. If you do decide to use one of the many favicons we have to offer don’t click “Download this favicon” because that will give you a file in the Windows .ico format. Instead right click on the image of the and choose “Save Picture As”.
  2. After you have the image you would like to use as your favicon, goto your Blogger.com blog and create a new post. It does not matter what you call it since you don’t need to publish it. Once you have created a new post use the image upload button to upload your favicon to your Blogger.com blog.

    Once you have uploaded the image, you will need to switch to “Edit HTML” mode if you are using the “Compose” mode. Once you are looking at the HTML you will see something like this:
    <img src="http://bp0.blogger.com/_7rflRHkQmUU/SFc_ZW22lcI/AAAAAAAAASA/Y99-skckaeM/s400/favicon.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5212704798569567682" border="0" />. You need to highlight and copy the part in quotes right after src. In this case it would be: http://bp0.blogger.com/_7rflRHkQmUU/SFc_ZW22lcI/AAAAAAAAASA/Y99-skckaeM/s400/favicon.png. You should paste it into Notepad or another text editor. You don’t want to lose this and you will be closing the Blogger.com editing window next.
  3. Once you have the location of the image you uploaded copied, you can click on the Layout tab of your Blogger.com blog. Once you are at the Layout, you need to click “Edit HTML” Look in the HTML for a tag that says <head> </head> and right below above it paste: <link href=” rel=’shortcut icon’/>
    <link href=” rel=’icon’ type=’image/png’/>
    Once you have those lines pasted into the template, copy the src of the image you want to use as you favicon that you uploaded earlier and paste it into the two lines you just added where the href=” is. In our case it looks like this: <link href='http://bp0.blogger.com/_7rflRHkQmUU/SFc_ZW22lcI/AAAAAAAAASA/Y99-skckaeM/s400/favicon.png' rel='shortcut icon'/>
    <link href='http://bp0.blogger.com/_7rflRHkQmUU/SFc_ZW22lcI/AAAAAAAAASA/Y99-skckaeM/s400/favicon.png' rel='icon' type='image/png'/>

    Click save template and your Blogger.com should now have your fancy new custom favicon showing on the address bar when you visit your blog.

If you want to see how we did it take a look at our Blogger.com Free Favicon blog where we added our great favicon.

You can use other free hosting services to host your custom favicon, but you don’t want to use an image hosting service that deletes images after so many days. Using Blogger.com to host the images works well, but you could also use Google Page Creator, or even your Flickr account.

Have fun adding your custom favicon to your Blogger.com blog!

Update: It appears that Internet Explorer is being difficult and might need you to use a .ico file. Check this post for more information. Blogger.com Favicon’s in Internet Explorer