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