Dougie Hunt

Unicode Icons for WordPress

Tired of waiting for icons to load on your website? Fontawesome slowing down WordPress? I use Unicode icons.

🔥 WordPress 👾 5,763 Views

⭐ Updated 28 January 2024

💥 Published 28 January 2024

Faster, Lighter WordPress Icons

A lightweight alternative to WordPress icon font libraries

If you’re building a WordPress site you’ll probably want to use icons and might opt for using FontAwesome or something similar.

FontAwesome is great, and there are lots of other great free and paid icon libraries out there – but they also tend to increase the page load times of your WordPress site by adding extra server requests.

Speed is an incredibly important factor in both SEO and user experience. Nobody likes slow WordPress websites… Google especially doesn’t.

There is a lightweight alternative and that’s to use Unicode icons.

The great news is that you don’t need to do anything to use Unicode icons, symbols, and characters as your computer comes with them built-in.

How to use these Unicode icons

Below is a list of popular Unicode icons I use

Unicode icons are regular text and you can just copy and paste them into your html as long as the encoding is UTF-8.

  • Find a Unicode icon to use below or using this useful Unicode icons website
  • Copy the html code for the icon
  • For HTML: Paste the icon in to your html code
  • For CSS: Use the value in the content property
  • For JS and PHP: Use the text in strings

Popular Unicode Icons

Just copy and paste icons...

Smiley ☺
Menu ☰
Middle Dot •
Black Star ★
White Star ☆
Tick ✔ ☑
Cross ✘ ✖
Up Arrow ▲ △ ↑
Down Arrow ▼ ▽ ↓
Right Arrow ► ▷ →
Left Arrow ◀ ◁ ←
Registered ®
Copyright ©
Trademark ™

Your WordPress website probably doesn't need all those icons

Keep it simple stupid ☺

When creating your WordPress website you probably add in lots of complexity.

Complexity isn’t great for speed, maintenance, or user experience.

The best idea is to KISS and keep it simple, stupid.

Simplicity in itself is incredibly difficult but refining your website over time is a win!

Design for user experience.
Build for maintenance.
Optimise for speed.
Write for humans.
Structure for Google.

Emojis for WordPress

Oh, and don't forget about emojis

There’s also a huge array of built-in and support emoticons, or emojis for short.

Just like Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics you can use little symbol icons to say a lot.

After all an image can say a thousand words… and an emoji says 💩

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