Next-Gen Image Format WebP
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Most websites serve images in JPEG or PNG format. The next-gen image formats like WebP, JPEG 2000, and JPEG XR can further reduce image file sizes. How do you use WebP on your website to increase your Google PageSpeed Insights performance score?
What is WebP? Why Serve WebP?
Developed by Google in 2010, WebP is an image format providing both lossless and lossy compression on the web. It is used to create smaller, richer images that make the web faster.
Lossless WebP is 26% smaller than PNG. Lossy WebP is 25-34% smaller than JPG. Both lossless and lossy WebP support transparency. Transparent lossy WebP provide three times smaller than PNG.
The PageSpeed Insights recommends that you serve images in next-gen formats like JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP for better compression than PNG or JPEG, faster downloads and less data consumption.
Browser Support for WebP
Support for WebP has increased since its announcement in 2010. As of March 2021, WebP is supported by 93% of the web browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Opera, and Safari on iOS.
You serve WebP images only in browsers that support them, and fall back to JPG/PNG formats for browsers that don’t. For instance, if a browser indicates that it accepts WebP, the web server will send WebP images.
How to Use WebP on Your Website?
As you can tell from above, since not all browsers support WebP, you can’t simply upload WebP images. The easiest way is to use a plugin like that converts your images to WebP on your WordPress website and provides the original image as a fallback for browsers that don’t support WebP. Here are some plugins that convert your images to WebP are EWWW Image Optimizer, Optimole, WebP Express, ShortPixel, and Imagify.
Conclusion
Your website’s images make up a big part of the file size of a web page. It is imperative to reduce the image size especially if you have many images. WebP is a next-gen image format that can reduce the file size versus JPEG or PNG.
Even though over 93% of the web browsers support WebP, you still need a plugin to convert images to WebP and serves WebP images in browsers that support WebP and the original images in browsers that don’t. This way, your website loads faster and it increases your Google PageSpeed Insights performance score.
