What is WebP? What are its Advantages and Disadvantages?

As visibility in the digital world becomes increasingly important day by day, the optimization of websites also holds great significance. Among many different parameters, it’s essential for images used on websites to be of sizes that do not cause slowness, which is a prominent factor in search engine optimization. One of the fundamental parameters of SEO efforts is site loading speed. Extensive efforts made to rank organically high on search engines require significant labor and investment.

While it’s possible to achieve effective results with the various opportunities offered by the digital world, correctly optimizing images and enhancing user experience are shortcuts to reaching the goal for webmasters and site authorities. While a vast majority of digital images are in JPEG format, Google has developed a new format called WebP for high-quality and low-sized images. Being an open-source image compression format, WebP is becoming increasingly preferred by users day by day. So, what is WebP?

What is the WebP Format?

In search engine optimization, the loading speed of websites is extremely important. Many studies have shown that websites experiencing delays in loading suffer significant visitor losses. Therefore, it’s crucial for images to be both high-quality and occupy minimal space. With the aim of reducing the space occupied by images on the web, Google has developed a new format called WebP. The most significant innovation offered by Google with this new format is the utilization of a much more efficient compression algorithm. The new image format, WebP, can reduce image sizes to much lower levels compared to its counterparts. Moreover, this process also ensures that the image quality remains exceptionally high.

Images that significantly reduce the space they occupy on hard disks offer much faster loading performance. This contribution in improving user experience results in an increase in the number of visitors to websites. One of the significant features of the WebP format is its lower data usage. WebP processes images using a prediction-based coding method. With this method, values from adjacent blocks are used to predict the value of a pixel in a block, and only the difference is processed.

What are the Advantages of the WebP Format?

The WebP format developed by Google offers many advantages compared to its counterparts:

• Image sizes are reduced to much smaller and reasonable levels.
• It is one of the most effective image editing tools in optimizing page speed.
• Image losses are kept to a minimum.
• WebP supports all image formats.
• There is no loss in the quality of the reduced-size images; rich and high-quality images are obtained.
• Offering much more compression options compared to different formats, WebP produces images that load faster.
• It enables websites to use lower bandwidth.

What are the Disadvantages of the WebP Format?

There are some disadvantages to using the WebP format despite its many innovations. Despite being in use for over a decade and continuous improvements being made, it cannot be said that the WebP format is widely supported by image processing tools. However, with the increasing preference for WebP by more and more users, it’s possible that this situation may change soon. Nevertheless, there are image processing tools and platforms that support the format.

Being a product of Google, WebP is supported by Chrome. However, other web browsers do not directly support the format. Yet, it’s possible to use WebP in different browsers through extension installation upon request. WebP format is not supported in WordPress-based websites by default. However, it’s possible to use it in WordPress with the help of plugins.

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