Adding Image Hyperlinks in Gmail signature

Almost everyone loves a fancy, attractive signature. Especially professionals, who would like to display their logo that redirects to their website or social-platform logos that links to their profile pages. We often receive questions on this topic in the Gmail Help Community, hence this blog post.

To begin, we would need the relevant logos or social media icons. I'm not big on social platforms and the only social media I use is Twitter. So, I shall use that logo as an example in this blog article. Since the logo will be a part of our Gmail signature, we won't require a big image file. In fact, a smaller file is preferable.

Once we have the relevant logos and/or social media icons with us, we can proceed to create our Gmail Signature with them. So, we head over to the General tab under Gmail settings and scroll down to the Signature section.

We don't have any signature created. So we click on the "+ Create new" button and insert the Signature name and then the text content.

At this point, it looks like the following. 

To include the image, you'd need to click on the "Insert image" icon circled in red above and then proceed to select the source between Google Drive, Upload, or the Web URL of that image. I chose to upload an image from my computer.

The logo is now inserted into the Gmail signature. But the size of it still looks large.

If we click on it, we shall see the option to set the image in varying sizes. For this blog-post, I have chosen to click on Small. 

The image is now noticeably smaller and we can now proceed to make this image a hyperlink. At this point, it would be a nice idea to open the destination URL on another tab and copy that URL. 

To, make it a hyperlink, we select the image with the mouse as we would a line of text and then click on the "Link" icon as highlighted with the red circle.

Once done, a pop-up window opens to paste the destination URL, as shown in the screenshot below.

We then click on the blue OK button, select the other signature default options and finish things by clicking on the Save Changes button at the bottom of the Gmail Settings page.

Note: For more information on how to set up your Gmail signature, you can read this blog post - Setting multiple signatures in Gmail.

Thereafter, when you compose an email, the signature will show up as usual and upon clicking the Twitter image, we can see the link it directs to.

So far so good, but this is where I ran into some trouble. As usual, I sent out the test email to my Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo!, and AOL accounts. The email, when opened in Yahoo and AOL, won't display the Twitter logo. The element exists because hovering over it showed the hyperlinked URL at the bottom left corner of the screen.

Attempting to load or show the image would generate a Google error message. 

This could be a potential dealbreaker for many. So, I created another signature by inserting the image in the Gmail signature - through the Web Address (URL) method, resized it, and sent out a second set of email to the same four test accounts. This time, the logo was visible at the recipients' end on all four addresses. 

So, if you happen to add the images in your Gmail signatures by uploading them from your computer and experience this issue, you can try inserting the images through their web URL and check if that works for you.

If you have any questions, please feel free to include them in the comments.