Favicon ?!

Any “good” website comes with a favicon, that little picture near the URL bar in your web browser. I’ve noticed recently that for mine, it couldn’t be cached by web browsers and that neither was it compressed as you may notice on that webpagetest.org.

So let’s solve that quickly !

Set the MIME type

First of all, I have no clue why, but Apache2 does not recognize .ico correctly, so you have to set the MIME type by yourself, let’s do it:

AddType image/x-icon .ico

If you do not specify that binding, the following steps won’t work !

Caching

Now let’s activate the expires module if it’s not already done:

a2enmod  expires

And let’s add our caching rule:

ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 1 year"

I set the caching time to one year since I don’t change frequently my favicon, it’s up to you.

Compressing

The deflate module allows Apache2 to compress stuff, here we’ll first activate it:

a2enmod deflate

We need to configure it now:

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/x-icon

Last but not least, restart Apache2:

service apache2 restart

Result

Let’s run the test once again at webpagetest.org !

And the favicon is no more within the “not compressed” nor “not cached” section:

I do agree that it’s just the favicon who cares, but you can use that configuration for other kind of assets, such as pictures, scripts, stylesheets, …