The People in Charge at WP announced “WordPress 5.8 adds WebP support“. This is great news!
WebP is a relatively new image format – developed by Google and announced in 2010. It can use both lossy and lossless compression (though not, as far as I know, at the same time), and supports animation and transparency. WebP is designed to create files that are smaller for the same quality, or of higher quality for the same size, than JPEG, PNG, and GIF image formats. It is supported by newer versions of all major browsers.
The WP implementation isn’t perfect. It would be nice if, when encountering a browser that doesn’t support WebP, WP would serve a JPG or PNG version instead. Doesn’t sound like it will do that, so older-browser users will get a blank image or an error. Not perfect, but a big, welcome step forward.
Another question yet to be answered – how should I convert all my existing images to WebP? I use the image optimizer built into the superb LiteSpeed cache, so I’m hoping the ability to convert to WebP is added in near future. If not, will have to look for another solution.
