Add a Favicon to WordPress

The WordPress requirement is one line: a square image with height and width of at least 512 pixels, in PNG format ideally. Below that, the uploader refuses the file or the frame keeps the default WordPress logo. Beyond the raw size, favicon design has its own physics — a wide banner cropped to a square becomes an unreadable strip, and no setting repairs that after upload.

• Size: at least 512×512 pixels — WordPress needs this for the phone home-screen tile.
• Shape: exactly 1:1; PNG with a transparent background or a flat JPG.
• Content: a mark that fills the frame — no wordmarks, no taglines.
• Colours: two at most; detail that reads at poster size turns to mud at 32 pixels.

Name the file recognisably — favicon-512.png — and upload it through wp-admin rather than dropping it into a folder by hand, because the Site Icon flow goes through the Media Library.

Block themes offer a shortcut — edit the header in the Site Editor, select the Site Logo block, and switch on "Use as site icon" — and when a theme strips every setting screen out, a child theme can print the icon tags itself. The child-theme route keeps the parent theme untouched so a theme update cannot wipe your change; it is also the method when you want full control over which files are referenced.

1. In File Manager, open wp-content/themes and find (or create) your child theme folder — the child theme guide covers creation.
2. Open the child theme's functions.php.
3. Add a small function hooked to wp_head that prints a link tag:
   add_action( 'wp_head', function () { echo '<link rel="icon" href="' . esc_url( get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . '/favicon-32x32.png' ) . '" sizes="32x32">'; } );
4. Upload favicon-32x32.png (and an 180×180 apple-touch version) beside functions.php.
5. Save, reload the site, and check the page source for your tag with the child theme path.

A PHP error after saving means a missing semicolon or quote in the snippet — restore the previous functions.php from File Manager and retry. The account this runs on is ordinary WordPress hosting; no special server feature is needed.

Read the page source: a working Site Icon adds link tags pointing at files inside wp-content/uploads — sizes such as 32×32 and 192×192, plus an apple-touch-icon at 180×180. The source tells you which of the three failure modes you are in.

• No icon tags at all — the Site Icon was never saved; redo the upload.
• Tags point at an old filename — a cache is still serving the previous page; purge it.
• Tags point at files that return 404 — the generated image was deleted from the Media Library; re-upload.

Load the homepage, press Ctrl+U (or prepend view-source: to the address), search for rel="icon", and open one of the listed file URLs — the image should load, not 404.