WebP is a new, modern image format meant to enhanced lossless and lossy compression for images on the web. One of the things that can really drag a web site’s performance down is the time it takes to load images. WebP lossless images are 26% smaller in file size when compared to PNGs and 25-34% smaller when compared to JPEG images.
Lossless WebP also supports transparency, or alpha channel, as well to ensure that an image’s design isn’t affected when converting to WebP. In fact, Lossy WebP takes things a step further and can provide the same image at up to 3x smaller than it’s PNG counterpart.
How can you use WebP images?
Unfortunately, as of the time of this writing, WebP is not supported by all browsers and most designers still work with JPEGs and PNGs. However, there are conversion tools, such as the one Google provides. However, being that most websites perform better when images are served up from a Content Delivery Network (CDN), we suggest that most website owners go that route.
A great CDN is Optimole, they have a cost effective CDN that works particularly well with WordPress websites. As Optimole is serving up images on a website’s behalf, it is able to recognize the User Agent/Browser being used. It can then take this information and either present the default JPEG or PNG image if the web browser does not support the new WebP format. If the browser does support WebP, then it will serve that image up instead.
For more information on how to setup a CDN, contact us today.