Is putting your favicon.ico file in a non-root path a bad idea?

Question

When and how do browsers request the favicon.ico file? Do they always check for it in root, or do they read the content of the webpage first to see if the page specifies the

Answer 1

Remember that not all requests to your site are for HTML pages! Requests for non-HTML content, like bare image files (e.g, viewing http://example.com/image.jpeg directly in the browser), cannot see a <link> tag. Therefore, they must fall back to searching for the shortcut icon in the standard location at /favicon.ico.

This still doesn't mean that this needs to be the canonical location, though! You can still keep it in /images/favicon.ico if you want - just make sure that a redirect is in place from /favicon.ico to wherever your preferred location is.