WebP format: do you have to convert all the images on your website?

Images are essential for your website, whether it is a photographer's, association's or company's website.

Images are also an essential for a good communication.

The choice of images and their format can indeed have a strong impact on your website.  

Several factors are to be taken into account when you want to integrate images or visuals on your website. Depending on the use of your image, the choice of format may be different.    

Let's see why converting your images to WebP format is the best solution for your website.

What is the WebP format?

The WebP format is a format created by Google in 2010 in order to have a more powerful image format. The WebP format replaces the different standard image formats that we all know, such as JPEG or PNG.

The objective of this format is to keep a good image quality. This format will reduce the file size by 25% to 30% for a better optimization of the loading speed of your website pages. 

The WebP format will also allow you to compress your images with or without loss in order not to lose image quality, but also to have a light file.

This one thus ensures the animated images and the transparency like the PNG format. The WebP format will handle several types of images while reducing the file size, but keeping a quality similar to the original.

It has the same characteristics as other known standard formats such as JPEG or PNG.

How does the WebP format work?

As we have seen before, the WebP format is a superior compression format to the others, because it compresses with or without loss and thus allows to be lighter.

This format supports transparency and makes it possible to have a file three times smaller than the PNG format. It also takes fragments of images to build new pixels. WebP can also use a local palette.

To go further

Compression removes part of your data, while lossless compression reconstructs the exact data and none is removed.

Advantages and disadvantages of the WebP format

The WebP format has several specific features that make it an advantageous format.    

Advantages of the WebP format

• Lightweight format: the WebP format is a much lighter format than the PNG format. According to Google, the size of the format is between 25% and 35%.

• Transparency: WebP takes into account the transparency, which is practical for your website.

• Lossless or lossy compression: unlike the other two formats, WebP provides both types of compression.

• Speed of page loading: the WebP format, thanks to its small size, strongly helps page loading, which is an important point for your website and for the user experience.

Disadvantages of the WebP format

• The Safari browser: Safari remains the only browser that is not compatible with this format. Unless you have the latest version.

Why should you use the WebP format for your website?

The choice of the format for your images is essential, there are several formats as we have seen, with each its own particularities. Today, the WebP format is the one that is most suitable for your website.

Simply because the WebP format is a format that will above all benefit you on many points, it has more advantages than disadvantages.

As we have seen previously and to summarize, the advantages of the WebP format for your website are the following: light, transparency, speed of loading, optimization of pages, compression with or without loss.

All these aspects make it a complete format and adapted to a website.

The WebP format is today one of the most used formats and one of the best adapted for your websites, because it meets many important criteria for the good functioning of the website and its visibility.