- April 21, 2023
- 3 minute read
You may not have heard of WebP, but it’s a new image format that significantly reduces the size of images and increases page load speed.
This is a big deal because images are the major culprit in slow load speeds, which is bad news for user experience and Google search ranking results. Pages that are slow to load are annoying… both Google bots and real users can’t be bothered with them.
WebP is not exactly new, it’s been around since 2010, but it’s gaining momentum. Certainly, it’s not as well known as JPG and PNG formats, and only an estimated 1-2% of websites use WebP images, but this number is on the rise and we have recently modified all the images on our website so that they are delivered in WebP format.
If you have a WordPress site there are several plugins that can help deliver your image in WebP format. As with any plugin addition, you will need to check compatibility with WordPress core and other plugins to avoid possible site problems. If you’d like help moving over to WebP images on your website just let us know, we’re happy to help.
You can find out more about how WebP works on the Google Developers site.
