What Is Webp And Why Is It Important?

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WebP provides superior lossless and lossy compression for any images you add to your WordPress site. By using WebP, WordPress users can create image files that are not just smaller, but also allow your site to run and load faster. You can take most image files on your website and use tools provided by Google and others to convert them into WebP lossy or lossless images. There are also plugins and services available to convert and deliver WebP images for WordPress users. However, the most efficient route to getting your site set up with WebP is to hire a professional web development team.

WebP image format

With WebP, you can have the best of both worlds and improve your site’s user experience. In addition, it can resize and crop the images and adjust their brightness, color, and contrast. If you have many WEBP files, you can also batch convert them to JPEG, PNG, GIF, and BMP formats. In simpler terms, it’s designed to make it easier for website owners to use a variety of images in high-quality format while still keeping file sizes relatively small. Converting a webp to a jpg is relatively painless, and a google search turns up many online providers that will do it for free. If your site/app encourages users to download images, you might not want to make this switch.

What Are The Advantages Of Webp?

This test will check if the webpage is serving images in modern formats. Image formats like JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP often provide better compression than PNG or JPEG, which means faster downloads and less data consumption for users. If you are interested in how different image formats fare with lossless compression instead of lossy compression, check out my follow-up blog post on the subject. Google introduced the WebP format as part of its mission to reduce web load times.

It combines and improves the best qualities of the JPEG and PNG formats by providing advanced lossy and lossless compression. However, as an end-user, you would not be able to recognize any difference in the file type. Google Chrome, for example, displaysYouTubethumbnails in WebP.

Faster-loading webpages offer a better user experience and even boost a website’s ranking in search engines. In contrast, websites with slow-loading images might encourage users to look elsewhere when shopping for products and services. You can also use the Optimal plugin to help you convert images for browsers that support WebP. This plugin will optimize your WebP images and provide them to users via a CDN. ShortPixel is a freemium image compression plugin for WordPress.

Converter

Whether you use “lossy” or “lossless” compression, the end results with WebP images are a high-quality rendition of the original. WebP is a modern image file format developed by Google in 2010 that uses both lossy and lossless compression. The purpose is to provide smaller and faster images for websites, resulting in superior performance.

WebP image format

Popular web browsers like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Microsoft Edge have had WebP support for years. While there are many benefits of adopting WebP, there are some drawbacks that you should be aware of. Let’s go over issues regarding software – especially web browsers. To further illustrate the advantages of WebP over other formats like JPEG and PNG, let’s look at what the two offer in comparison. This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks.

Is Avif The Future Of Image Formats?

It would be a shame to lose the scaling benefits of a vector format, and I suspect it would actually increase the file size in most cases. And sites typically have way more than 200kb worth of images; it’s not uncommon for a page to have several megabytes of images. Many developers (myself included!) tend not to think about media size much at all.

  • AVIF support is already in Firefox behind a flag and should be coming soon to Chrome if this ticket is to be believed.
  • We hope this article has helped you understand more about WebP and solve issues you might face.
  • With the help of predictive coding, WebP files compress photos and graphics without reducing the quality of their appearance.
  • I think AVIF is a really exciting development and compared to WebP it seems like a true next-generation codec with about 30% better compression ratio compared to libjpeg.
  • We’re delegating all properties to the child img tag, so the right styles still make it to the image.
  • However, when compared to MozJPEG, WebP only performs better with small 500px images.

If you have used tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights, you probably have run into a suggestion to use “next-gen image formats”, namely Google’s WebP image format. Google claims that their WebP format is 25 – 34% smaller than JPEG at equivalent quality. Its main goal is to let us load different sources depending on resolution or support for a given image format. In this tutorial, we’ll see how we can leverage “next-gen" image formats like WebP.

Link To This Headingconverting Images To Webp

You can also use the Photon API to do the same thing as an alternative to plugins. And will instantly convert your JPEG and PNG images to your desired format with this API. But the folks at Google learned from the mistakes of previous standards, and the company created a long-term plan to promote WebP. Right from the start, they negotiated with those responsible for the main browsers on the market to add support for the format. Of course, some of the main browsers on the market – including Google Chrome, Firefox, and Opera – already support the WebP format. However, Safari and Internet Explorer are not yet supported.

The snippet above excels in its ability to match every possible browser with a modern “next-gen" image format. With these 3 image formats, we have perfect coverage across the browser spectrum. You also can convert existing files such as PNGs and JPEGs to the WebP format. Thanks to WordPress plugins, converting your PNG and JPEG images to WebP can be quick and easy.

Another plugin that works similarly is the Optimole plugin. On the free plan, there’s no limit when it comes to the number of images you can optimize, as long as you have less than 5,000 visits/month. If your monthly visitors exceed that limit, consider purchasing one of their premium plans.

In fact, according to Google, WebP lossless images are 26 percent smaller than PNGs, and lossy images are as much as 34 percent smaller than JPEGs. JPEG is excellent for images with many colors and is the preferred option for still photos. However, JPEG image files use lossy compression, which means you’ll see a decline in quality when they’re resaved or edited. Another downside to this format is that it doesn’t support transparency nor animation.

Understanding what it is and how to use it on your WordPress site can help you enhance your User Experience and overall reduce loading times. The file formats you use on your website have a major impact on its speed, quality, and performance. However, figuring out which image types to use can require a bit of research. CloudConvert is your Swiss army knife for file conversions. We support nearly all audio, video, document, ebook, archive, image, spreadsheet, and presentation formats.

What Are Webp Images?

This article was written before AVIF existed, but all of the same techniques discussed below will still work. You can use the avif-cli NPM package to convert images to this format, and follow the webp instructions. This WebP converter supports also the conversion of animated GIF to animated WebP. Now you have learned about the WebP format, which will help you have smaller sizes and richer quality images on your website. WebP is an open-source model, which means anyone can work on the format and improve it. Google’s developers have actively encouraged users to offer their input since its launch in 2010.

How To Use Webp Images Now

Make sure these images are not external, and there is WebP version of optimized image in your Media Library. Once you create WebP images and decide to display them on your website, it is important to check if they are properly applied. Even a small amount of compression can reduce the quality of an image, which is worth keeping in mind if you work with professional photographers and high-quality images. While GIFs have long been the dominant format for memes and other basic online animations, WebP files offer an alternative.

This typically means that users on smartphones don’t have to download image files as large as, say, a user with a large Mac computer screen. This can be particularly helpful since Internet connections on mobile devices tend to be slower than on other networks. If you use an alternative server to load image files, Shopify’s WebP support won’t automatically kick in, but the provider may have WebP support of its own. If you upload an image using WebP, its lossy compression algorithm uses predictive coding when encoding the image. In using this predictive coding, it uses the values of the block of pixels next to each other to predict the value of the block and encode only the difference. For more detail of the compression technique, please check out this link.

So when users select the WebP format for their images, conversion can be done there and then automatically when uploading or compressing images. WebP is a next-generation image format that can enhance the speed of your website and boost yourSearch Engine Optimizationefforts. File Format WEBP Created in 2010 by Google, the open standard https://wizardsdev.com/ allows users to save images in both lossy and lossless compression. Developers at Google claim the compression efficiency allows images to be compressed to sizes up to 34% smaller than JP… Image optimization is an essential aspect of website speed and performance.

The manual method is not as quick or straightforward as using a plugin. In addition to WebP conversion, ShortPixel also offers other helpful image optimization features like WP Retina 2x and CloudFlare compatibility. Even though WebP support on major web browsers has increasingly improved over the years, some browsers still Should you prefer WebP image format to PNG don’t support the file type. If you start using WebP now, you’ll improve the experience for many users right away. In the future, when Safari adds support, those users will get an upgraded experience as well, without any extra work on your part. You’ll need to install a Photoshop plugin to save images in the WebP format.