

WebP’s visual quality is often comparable to more ubiquitous formats. It supports encoding images in both lossless and lossy formats, making it a versatile format for any type of visual media, and a great alternative format to both PNG or JPEG. WebP is an image format developed and first released by Google in 2010. Let’s begin! What is WebP, and Why Should I Even Care? Such a topic can easily be its own book, but the focus of this post will be very specific: Google’s WebP image format, and how you can take advantage of it to serve images that have all the visual fidelity your images have now, but at a fraction of the file size. Many techniques exist for slimming down unruly images, and delivering them according to the capabilities of the devices that request them.

The solution to this dilemma is not one dimensional. The challenge is in walking the tightrope between visually rich content, and the speedy delivery of it. Images are expressive tools, and they have the ability to speak more than copy can. This is a problem, because images represent a significant portion of what’s downloaded on a typical website, and for good reason. You’re suddenly reminded of the bad old days of dial-up. On a doddering mobile connection, you can even see these images unfurl before you like a descending window shade. These images tug at your senses, and for content authors, they’re essential in moving people to do things.Įxcept that these images are downright huge. We’ve all been there before: You’re browsing a website that has a ton of huge images of delicious food, or maybe that new gadget you’ve been eyeballing.
