Back to docs
Site Configuration

How to Update Your Favicon and Social Preview Image

How to update your favicon and social preview image in Flint, and fix caching issues that prevent the new icon or image from appearing.

Quick Summary

If you're updating your favicon in Flint and something seems off, the answer is almost always one of these two things:

  • Where to find it: Open the Settings panel, click the Site Settings tab, then scroll to the Favicon section. Click Replace to upload a new image, then click Save.
  • If you've updated, saved, and published but still see the old favicon in your browser, it's almost certainly a cache. Clear your browser cache, hard-refresh, or open the site in an incognito window. The new favicon is live; your browser just hasn't noticed yet.

Search engines like Google take longer — sometimes days — to pick up favicon changes. That's normal and outside Flint's control.

How to Update Your Favicon in Flint

  1. 1.Open the Settings panel in your Flint project and click the Site Settings tab.
  2. 2.Scroll to the Favicon section and find Site Favicon.
  3. 3.Click Replace to upload your new favicon image. Square images work best — 32×32 or 64×64 pixels minimum, though higher resolutions like 512×512 look crisper on high-density screens. PNG and SVG are both supported.
  4. 4.Click Save in the top right of the Settings panel.
  5. 5.Publish your site so the change goes live on your domain.

You can confirm it worked by opening your published site in an incognito or private browsing window. If the new favicon shows up there, the change is live — any other browser still showing the old one is a caching issue.

"I changed the favicon but it still shows the old one"

Favicons are cached aggressively almost everywhere they appear, which is great for performance but frustrating when you're trying to update one. Work through these in order — the first one fixes most cases.

1. Hard-refresh the page

  • Mac: Cmd + Shift + R
  • Windows/Linux: Ctrl + Shift + R (or Ctrl + F5)

A normal refresh often doesn't touch the favicon cache. A hard refresh has a better shot.

2. Close and reopen the tab

Browsers typically load a favicon once when the tab opens and don't re-check it. Closing the tab entirely and opening the site in a fresh tab forces a new load.

3. Open the site in an incognito / private window

This is the fastest way to confirm whether the change is actually live. Incognito windows don't use your cached favicons. If the new icon appears in incognito, the change is live and you just need to clear your regular browser's cache.

4. Clear your browser cache

This is what worked for most users who got stuck. You don't need to clear your entire browsing history — most browsers let you clear data for a specific site:

  • Chrome: Settings → Privacy and security → Site settings → View permissions and data stored across sites → find your site → Delete
  • Safari: Safari → Settings → Privacy → Manage Website Data → search for your site → Remove
  • Firefox: Settings → Privacy & Security → Cookies and Site Data → Manage Data → find your site → Remove

Then reload the page.

5. Try a different browser

If it's showing correctly in Chrome but not Safari (or vice versa), that confirms it's a cache issue on the browser that's stuck, not a problem with your site.

Why Does This Happen?

Browsers cache favicons more aggressively than almost any other asset on the web. The favicon shows up in your tab strip, your bookmarks, your history, and your most-visited pages — and the browser wants all of those to render instantly, without waiting for a network request. So once the browser has a favicon for your domain, it tends to hold onto it.

This is great for performance and terrible for anyone trying to swap a favicon. The fix is almost always to force the browser to fetch a fresh copy (incognito, hard refresh, or clearing site data), not to re-do the work in Flint.

When to Contact Support

Reach out to Flint support if:

  • You've tried incognito mode and the new favicon still isn't appearing on your published site after 24 hours.
  • The favicon upload itself fails — the file is rejected or you see an error message.
  • The favicon appears correctly in the Flint editor preview but never appears on the live site, even in incognito.

When you contact support, please include:

  • A screenshot of what you're seeing
  • The URL of your published site
  • Which browser and operating system you're using
  • Confirmation that you've tried an incognito/private window

Updating Your Social Preview Image

The social preview image (also called an OG image or Open Graph image) is the image that appears when someone shares a link to your page on Slack, LinkedIn, Twitter/X, iMessage, or other platforms. It is separate from the favicon.

How to update it in Flint

  1. 1.Open the Settings panel and click the Site Settings tab.
  2. 2.Scroll past the Favicon section to Social Preview → Open Graph Image.
  3. 3.Click Replace to upload a new image. Recommended size is 1200×630 pixels. PNG or JPG both work.
  4. 4.Click Save in the top right of the Settings panel.
  5. 5.Publish your site so the updated image is live at your domain.

Per-page vs. site-wide

You can set a default social preview image at the site level, and override it for individual pages. To set a page-specific image, ask the Flint agent to update the OG image for that page, or edit the page's SEO settings directly.

Why the old image still shows up on social platforms

Every platform caches link preview data independently, so even after you publish, the old image may still appear for a while. To force a refresh:

  • Facebook: Use the Facebook Sharing Debugger — paste your URL and click "Scrape Again."
  • LinkedIn: Use the LinkedIn Post Inspector — paste your URL and click "Inspect."
  • Twitter/X: Twitter re-fetches card data when a URL is tweeted for the first time, or you can use the Card Validator to trigger a refresh.
  • Slack: Slack usually re-fetches within 24 hours. Pasting the link in a private channel or DM can sometimes trigger an immediate refresh.
  • iMessage / WhatsApp: These re-fetch when the link is sent fresh. There is no manual cache-busting tool for these.

If you want to guarantee a cache bust across all platforms immediately, you can change the URL of the image itself (e.g. upload a new file instead of replacing the existing one) — this forces every platform to treat it as a brand new image.