Are you still having problems with a slow website? Chances are that big images on your webpages are slowing you down. Compression and newer image formats are incredibly useful to increase your Core Web Vitals ranking.

What is the .webp image extension?

WebP is an image format developed by Google to increase website speed. It generally is 26% smaller than a PNG file and 25 to 34% smaller than JPG files. Lower file sizes help with page speed by reducing the amount of data that needs to be sent over the network. This leads to much faster page loading speed. Page loading speed is incredibly important in this day and age, as a small increase in page loading time can be catastrophic for website conversions.

Advantages of WebP

The main advantage of WebP is that it does not require any additional hardware or software to work. You can use it in almost any web browser, including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Edge. If you are using a web browser that does not support WebP, you can still use other compression formats such as JPEG, PNG, GIF, and BMP. However, these formats will not provide the same quality as WebP. Do you want to check which browsers support WebP? Check out caniuse.com.

WebP in WordPress

There are multiple options for running WebP in WordPress. Personally, I use WPVivid, since I have a pro license for it. It has an image optimization tool included (it’s mainly a back-up and staging solution). I like to keep things clean in WordPress, so this saves me from using another plugin.