CSS: Add Icon to Links

By Xah Lee. Date: . Last updated: .

You can add a little icon to links to indicate what type of link it is.

For example, suppose you have links to Twitter like this:

<a href="https://x.com/xah_lee">Xah Lee</a>

And you want browser to show a icon, like this

https://x.com/xah_lee

CSS Google Plus Twitter Facebook icon link-2
Link with favicons, Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus

Instead of using a img tag for each link, you should use CSS to add them, by matching the URL.

Here is the CSS code:

a[href*="x.com/"] {
background:url("https://twitter.com/favicon.ico") no-repeat left center;
padding-left:36px;
}

The CSS selector a[href*="x.com/"] matches any “a” tag with “href” attribute that has value contanining the string “x.com/”. For a full list of such selector syntax, see: CSS 3 Selector Syntax .

CSS, Background Image

CSS, Advanced