What is WebP and How Does It Work?

WebP is a modern format that provides high image quality in a small size, providing a faster and more interactive user experience even if your website has many images. Google developed WebP in 2010 to reduce the difficulties associated with large file size when storing good quality images. Google actively provides WebP, which is suitable for both lossy and lossless techniques. Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool recommends switching from JPEG and PNG to WebP format. This format is also actively used by many large technology companies.‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏

‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏ ‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏WebP is a modern image format that seamlessly combines the best of other formats, meaning WebP not only supports lossy and lossless compression, but also animation (like GIF) and alpha transparency (like PNG).

Benefits of WebP

Google recommends this format because it provides a superior lossy or lossless compression for WebP images. WebP technology can help you create lower-sized, more vibrant images that make web pages load faster and lighten page loads. It can also be used in many situations where popular formats such as webP animation, JPEG, PNG, GIF are used.

All this is the main reason why WebP has become a common image format today. Most leading browsers have started to support this format to help webmasters deliver richer and faster web performance.

WebP’s unique compression systems can display images at approximately two-thirds the size of the same image created in JPEG or PNG format.

With WebP, you can save images in both lossless and lossy format at a smaller file size than both PNG and JPEG files. This is great news for you if you are trying to optimize and speed up a website with legacy image formats.

This image format can make a big difference if your users have low bandwidth and slow connection speeds and you are running a lot of images on your website.

WebP lossless images are 26% smaller in size compared to PNGs. WebP lossy images are 25-34% smaller in size compared to JPEG images with the same SSIM quality index.

Lossless WebP supports alpha transparency at the expense of only 22% additional bytes. Where lossy RGB compression is acceptable, lossy WebP also supports transparency, providing file sizes up to 3x smaller than PNG.

WebP therefore helps transmit much smaller file sizes than traditional image formats.