Adding a favicon to your Wordpress.com blog

01 Jun 2009

Note: This is a revamp of a post from my old blog. It was originally published on June 1, 2009.

The documentation for adding favicons to Wordpress.com blogs is a bit confusing. The right way to do it is to create a Blavatar: Blog + Avatar.

A Blavatar is an uploaded picture that functions as your avatar when you comment on other blogs or when they link to your blog, and as your favicon.

To get started, open the Settings –> General page of a Wordpress.com blog dashboard. Upload a jpg or png to the “Blog Picture” panel, and then Wordpress.com will help you crop it to for it to be a valid favicon.

I recommend uploading a large, square Blavatar that Wordpress will then scale down to the proper favicon size, so that other Blavatar usage is at a good resolution.

This applies only to Wordpress.com blogs. For self-hosted Wordpress.org installations, you can either use one of the many available favicon plugins, or you can manually create and upload a favicon to your root directory.