Test Icon Horse for yourself
Get the icon for any site
Type in the domain name for any website (for example ), and Icon Horse will fetch the best available favicon for you.
Icon for: icon.horse
Served from:
https://icon.horse/icon/icon.horseAdvanced use
Some things can be customised on-the-fly via query parameters.
| Parameter | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
hostname | none | The hostname should be a fully-qualified domain name such as wikipedia.org, youtube.com, or bbc.co.uk.You may leave this blank if you provide a uri or email parameter (see below). |
uri | none | Sometimes, deriving a hostname is not convenient. So you can let Icon Horse do it for you!You can put in any URI here, such as: https://wikipedia.orghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia |
email | none | Maybe you want the favicon from an email address's domain? No problem. Any email will work, such as: test@example.com |
apikey | none | Identifies you as a Pro client, meaning you can use Pro features. Alternatively, you can use the X-API-Key HTTP header (X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY). |
fallback_text | EFF6FF | Specify a custom text colour for the fallback icon's text. Expects a hex colour value with no hash mark. Pro/Enterprise only |
fallback_bg | 1F2937 | Specify a custom background colour for the fallback icon. Expects a hex colour value with no hash mark. Pro/Enterprise only |
size | large | If the site has multiple options available for icons, serve the size you prefer. Please note that if you request a size that is not available, you will be served whatever icon size is closest to the one you requested – unless you set ignore_other_sizes (see below), in which case you will get the fallback in the size you requested.Available values are:
|
ignore_other_sizes | false | If you specified a size param, and if you want Icon Horse to serve you a fallback if that size is not available (but other sizes might be), set this to true.Pro/Enterprise only |
status_code_404 | false | By default, the fallback image is served as an image with a 200 HTTP status code. But, if you would like it to return a 404 HTTP status code (along with the fallback image itself), then set this to true. This might be useful if you want to know if the site's icon is unreachable.Pro/Enterprise only |
Frequently asked questions
Have other questions? Ask us directly.
- How do I use this?
- The most clear and concise use-case for these icons is in an
<img>tag. It could be written like so:<img src="https://icon.horse/icon/example.com" alt="example.com icon">
This icon will return the icon associated with the domain example.com (see it here – since example.com doesn't have an icon, we serve the default fallback/placeholder instead).
They are also useable anywhere you can insert an image – of course on the web, but also in mobile and desktop apps! - Why not just use
example.com/favicon.ico? - Favicons are generally very very low resolution and small – typically not larger than 32 x 32 pixels. This might work for some use-cases, but with the increasingly sophisticated software being built these days, it likely isn't, especially on retina screens.
Also, there are no fallbacks if the site doesn't have a/favicon.ico. You will end up with a broken image.
Some sites also put their favicons in a different places entirely, which might even be on a different server entirely! So you are not guaranteed to get an icon even if its available.
Icon Horse scours all the places the icons could be, and automatically selects the best one available. - Which icon actually gets served by Icon Horse?
- Sites on the internet typically use many different types of icons for various things. Favicons are a kind of icon that's used to show an icon in your internet browser's UI.
The "favicon" is usually not bigger than 32 x 32 pixels – this makes it ideal to economise on bandwidth and be used in a place where it will typically never appear bigger than that size.
There's also many other kinds of icons out there for various use cases, such as a touch icon used as an icon for bookmarks for a site on mobile devices' homescreens.
Unlike the favicon itself, many of these additional icons present a much more attractive and useable icon, some displayable at much higher resolutions!
PRO subscribers can specify the image sizes they prefer to serve. They can also choose to serve a fallback icon if the specified size is not available and only lower resolution icons exist. - What can I customise?
- Sometimes, a website doesn't have any icons at all – or that site might not exist. But in your UI, you may want to still show an icon anyway, and a broken image doesn't look too nice.
For this reason, we automatically serve a fallback icon. Here's an example for a domain name that doesn't exist.
PRO subscribers can customise the image that's used – they can specify things like background colour, text colour, or even override it entirely and provide an image we will serve as a fallback instead.
