Additional image optimization plugins you might consider include EWWW Image Optimizer and Optimole. Thanks to WordPress plugins, converting your PNG and JPEG images to WebP can be quick and easy. Plus, you won’t have to directly edit any of your site’s files, as the extension will do all the work for you. To get started, you can simply click on Choose Files, select your image, and then hit the Start conversion button.

(The server was already losslessly compressing uploaded images, with an average savings of about 10-15% for JPEGs and 50-75% for PNGs; the 59% WebP figure is in addition to that). Hi Jeremy – Do you have any data indicating that using webp reduces page load times? I wouldn’t assume that it does without testing it extensively. Webp is much slower to decode than jpeg, so the fact that the images are smaller doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get faster page loads. A web page isn’t a blob of uniform data, that decodes and renders at a uniform rate. These are all completely different formats with different codecs.

How To Use WebP Images on WordPress (Shrink Image File Sizes up to 35%)

Open Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Safari, or Opera — almost any browser that supports WEBP image display. Head to a site that uses WEBP images for bandwidth saving, like any of the app listings on play.google.com. It is your choice to use an older unsupported version of Photoshop. The fault is not the software… its your choice to use older versions, if you want WebP support upgrade. Less media storage—WebP’s enhanced compression also means less storage space. This is crucial for sites that host a large amount of images, and could even save you money on your web hosting.

• In addition to the libraries provided by the WebP team, several free, open-source, and commercial image editing tools support WebP.
• Plus, you can use our online tool without downloading any software.
• WebP can free up space, allowing websites to offer more content.
• WebP has a lossless 8-bit transparency channel with only 22% more bytes than PNG.
• The smaller the compression is on your image files, the less space you’ll have to pay for.
• This can be complicated by whether encoding is being done ahead of time (static/build) or on-the-fly (on-demand).

Key user-centric metrics often depend on the size, number, layout, and loading priority of images on the page. This is why a lot of our guidance on performance talks about image optimization. ShortPixel WordPress pluginShortPixel is a popular WordPress image optimization plugin that can help you automatically resize and compress the images you upload to your WordPress site.

WebP Format: Technology, Pros & Cons, and Alternatives

This estimate helps Lighthouse report the potential savings under the “Serve images in next-gen formats” section. I run a photography website so the images are both plentiful and also key to the content. I already use Imagify to create smaller JPEGs but I’m hesitant to generate an entirely new format. I have seen people say the lossless WebP option is pretty useless, often increasing the file size. However, a minority of browsers, notably Safari on older macOS versions, still don’t offer WebP support.

We’ve explored how to use WebP on WordPress and how to save it as JPEG or PNG. We hope this article has helped you understand more about WebP and solve issues you might face. While there are many benefits of adopting WebP, there are some drawbacks that you should be aware of.

How to Save WebP Images as JPEG or PNG Files

Those commands are subject to the usual r/w/x permission restrictions imposed by the file system, but that’s about it. When finished, open your text editor and create a new file named webp.js in your web project’s root folder. If you’re familiar with Photoshop, the easiest way to get a taste for WebP is to try out the WebP Photoshop Plugin. After you install it, you’ll be able to use the Save As option (not Save For Web!) and select either WebP or WebP Lossless from the format dropdown.

Anyone interested in learning how to create AVIF images using Squoosh or building the command line encoder avifenc can do so at the codelab on serving AVIF files. See the Pen Image format comparison 5a by Addy Osmani.Finally, let’s look at a photo with a lot more text elements than previous images — a poster. When we go down to lower qualities and target a reasonably small size , we can observe that the JPEG has strong color banding and halos around the text. The WebP avoids an amount of the blockiness, looking incrementally better. The AVIF preserves the sharp edges a little better than either JPEG or WebP, producing a smooth image. To better understand the differences in quality and compression offered by the different formats, we can visually compare images and evaluate the differences.

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With this extension, you can download images directly from the right-click context menu in any format you desire, which makes the process simple. The WebP image format was introduced by Google more than a decade ago, and during the last few years, it has become mainstream. The images in this format are smaller and lighter than others, and its superior compressibility has made it quite popular lately.

Images are one of the best ways to engage potential leads, communicate your message and branding, and get people on your side. There are many image formats from PNGs to WebP format and much more. Build a responsive website that works well across mobile and other devices.

Compression quality

Complex compression algorithms may require higher processing power to encode/decode images. This can be complicated by whether encoding is being done ahead of time (static/build) https://wizardsdev.com/en/news/webp-or-png-to-choose/ or on-the-fly (on-demand). While encoding may be one-time in the case of static images, the browser still has to decode images before rendering them.

Still we’re using this pretty low quality level even on large masthead images without complaints. If you look at the JPEG quality level vs file size charts, 60% is quite the optimum. But you are incorrect in saying that the JPEG container format leaves no room for lossless compression. It is true there isn’t much wiggle room, but there is wiggle room nonetheless. There are tools like jpegrescan that can squeeze out an extra 1-2% savings. Sometimes there is also room for improvement by making a JPEG progressive .