How to do favicons on websites

Instead of serving dozens of icons, all you need is just five icons and one JSON file.

For the browser using HTML:

<link rel="icon" href="/favicon.ico" sizes="32x32" />
<link rel="icon" href="/icon.svg" type="image/svg+xml" />
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/apple-touch-icon.png" />

If you’re making a PWA (Progressive Web App), also add this to the HTML:

<link rel="manifest" href="/manifest.webmanifest" />

And a file with the web app manifest:

// manifest.webmanifest
{
  "icons": [
    { "src": "/icon-192.png", "type": "image/png", "sizes": "192x192" },
    {
      "src": "/icon-mask.png",
      "type": "image/png",
      "sizes": "512x512",
      "purpose": "maskable"
    },
    { "src": "/icon-512.png", "type": "image/png", "sizes": "512x512" }
  ]
}

Maskable icons should have bigger paddings. The safe zone is a 409×409 circle. Use maskable.app to check your icon.

That’s it. If you want to know how I got here, the compromises I had to make, and how to build a set like this from scratch in a step-by-step fashion, stay tuned in for the rest of the article.

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