Each time I am running PageSpeed Insights I am getting suggestion to “Serve images in next-gen formats” using “Image formats like WebP and AVIF”. Thru the years I have read, including on SitePoint, about those new formats but I have never considered them, so far. By looking at this support table it looks like AVIF has still a long way to go versus Webp.
I am wondering if you guys web developers are using them or not ? WebP or AVIF ? Or waiting for Jpeg XL ?
By the (no)-sound of it I guess I have to understand the WebP or AVIF picture’s formats are not driving the crowd crazy !
I confess I haven’t really thought about using WebP, but I’ve just tried saving a random JPEG in WebP format and there is a huge saving in file size, with no loss of quality that I can discern (although the sun is making it hard to see clearly).
I think I’ll need to go and explore this further. Thank you for making me think about it! 
The odd times I’ve tried webp it’s actually made the image larger! 
Not that webp format on Safari on old Mac’s running older than Big Sur. So you may exclude many Mac users from your site. https://caniuse.com/?search=webp That is why I avoid webp for now…
JPEG - 969kB
WebP - 535kB
I was going to upload them for comparison, but Discourse won’t accept the WebP format. 
Actually I find I have used a couple of webp images, and I added a couple of lines of JS to cater for when it wasn’t supported.
You can use those newer image types if you use the < picture > element with it so you can provide a JPG fallback if the browser or device doesn’t recognize the newer format yet.
I did look into WebP a while back, but at the time support seemed to be too poor for it to be viable, so I kind of forgot about it.
Looking now, support has improved quite a bit, so it may be an option. But then there is having the time an inclination to go and convert a whole load of images. I would probably first want to test what the gains would be, to see if it is worth the effort.
I’ve been holding off switching from jpeg over to webp for a while now, and notice the support is pretty broad now. I’ll probably do it within a year. For my case, my fully optimized jpegs (with exif removed, that’s one of the biggest space savers) are still about double the size of a .webp.
I’m a fan of Cloudinary, a cloud-based service that offers a solution to a web application’s entire image management pipeline. They can automatically perform smart image resizing, cropping and conversion (favoring WebP if it is supported by the browser) while delivering images via a high speed CDN.
They have a very generous free tier — I don’t pay anything for my personal site and no credit card is required.
well if your site have lots of images, then i also recommend you WebP format, because it really affects you speed.
This topic was automatically closed 91 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.