How to add icon to webpage tabs in blogdown
If you are using other themes such as Academic, you might have to create an icon instead of a favicon.ico file. As per instructions here, you have to create a square 512x512 pixel image named icon.png and place the image in your root assets/images/ folder. For the Academic theme, the assets folder is located under themes\hugo-academic when using RStudio.
So be careful if you have a Hugo theme that does not support simply pasting the favicon.ico file in the root of the static folder.
If you have a file named favicon.ico in root directory, most browsers will use it. The easiest way is to add favicon.ico in static directory (therefore, Hugo will copy it to root directory), see here.
Favicon is declared in <head> element. In minimal theme, the <head> element is defined in header.html file.
As you can see, the minimal theme does not provide support for favicon.
First, check if you have a layouts/partials/header.html file.
If this file does not exist, copy themes/minimal/layouts/partials/header.html file to layouts/partials directory (you may have to create this directory).
You have to modify the layouts/partials/header.html file.
Add after opening <head> tag:
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="{{ "imgPath" | relURL }}">