What is WEBP image format

If You have heard the name WEBP before, then it is probably not weird. The WEBP image format was developed by Google in 2010 and since the 1.0 version was released in 2018, most major browsers have implemented the WEBP image format as a valid image format.

Googles WEBP image format does both support a lossy and lossless compression and even animations like we usually see with GIF. According to Google a WEBP animation file is about 64% smaller than a similar GIF animation.

The lossless technique used by the WEBP format is very technical advanced. It was developed by the Google developer Jyrki Alakuijala and it makes use of advanced techniques such as dedicated entropy codes for different color channels, exploiting 2D locality of backward reference distances and a color cache of recently used colors.

The WEBP container supports lossless compression, meta data, transparency like used with PNG images, colour profiles and animations. This means the WEBP image format can be used for any type of image and therefore we only really need one image format.

You can read more about the WEBP image format here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebP

Why should the WEBP image format be used on your website?

WEBP is a wonderful and fantastic image format and it should definitely be used on your website. With the WEBP format you get smaller images and that will result in faster loading times on your websites. Smaller images will also help the ongoing problem that our earth is facing at this very moment: The internet is a huge polluter and if it was a country it would be the 6th worst carbon dioxide polluter in the world.

When using the image format WEBP, you ensure an optimisation of your website that will result in faster loading times and these loading times will be good for your organic SEO. Besides a better SEO you are also making your website more accessible to people in areas with slower bandwidth. We don't think about it, but there are actually many places around the earth where the internet is still running either 2G or 3G.

##Browser support Since WEBP has been around since 2018, it is supported in many of the major browsers, but there are still some out there that still doesn’t support the image format. Underneath here you can see the current browser support from Can i use.

Author

Michael Andersen

I am a self-taught and highly passionate web developer currently living in Sweden, where I use my skills to make the internet a better place through ethical and sustainable web design.