Favicon not updating after deploy? 5 fixes for the browser's favicon cache

You deployed a new favicon, hard-refreshed, and the tab still shows the old one. That is normal: browsers keep favicons in their own cache (Chrome, for example, stores them in a separate favicon database), so a page reload often doesn't re-fetch the icon.

Here are the fixes, roughly in the order worth trying.

1. Cache-bust the icon URL

<link rel="icon" href="/favicon.ico?v=2" sizes="any">
<link rel="icon" href="/icon.svg?v=2" type="image/svg+xml">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/apple-touch-icon.png?v=2">

Bump v= every time the icon changes. A new URL is a new cache entry, so the browser has to fetch it.

2. Open the icon file directly

Visit https://yoursite.com/favicon.ico in a tab and hard-reload that tab (Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+R). That often replaces the cached copy faster than reloading the page. A fresh browser profile or a private window is the quickest way to check what new visitors see.

3. Replace /favicon.ico at the domain root

Some browsers and tools request /favicon.ico at the root even when your HTML points somewhere else. If an old favicon.ico is still sitting at the root (or cached on your CDN), it keeps showing up. Replace it, or purge it from the CDN.

4. Ship the sizes each platform asks for

• favicon.ico (16 and 32 inside it) for classic browser tabs
• apple-touch-icon.png at 180x180 for iOS home screens
• 192x192 and 512x512 PNGs listed in site.webmanifest for Android / PWA installs

If one of these is missing, that platform falls back to whatever it had before, which looks like "the old icon won't go away".

5. Make the manifest point at files that exist

If site.webmanifest lists /icon-192.png but you deployed android-chrome-192x192.png, installed PWAs keep the old icon. Open the manifest URL in the browser and click each icon path to check.

Reference

The full size table and a paste-ready <head> block are in this guide: favicon sizes and cache fixes.

If you'd rather not assemble the set by hand, Favikit is a free, MIT-licensed generator (repo) that runs fully in the browser: you drop in one image and it outputs the .ico, the PNG sizes, the manifest and the <head> tags. Nothing is uploaded.

Disclosure: this post and Favikit were written with AI assistance.