In the upcoming WordPress 5.8 update, scheduled to ship July 20th, WordPress is allowing its users to use a new image format. No, it is not SVG, which technically is not an image by the way. There are still security hurdles to jump for that to happen one day. However, WordPress is now supporting the WebP image format, which carries with it the promise of better performance for those who decide to use it. This new more modern image file format was created by Google back in September 2010, and is now supported by 95% of the web browsers in use around the world. It has distinct advantages over the more commonly used formats, providing both lossless and lossy compression that is 26% smaller in size compared to PNGs and 25-34% smaller than comparable JPEG images. Adding WebP support to WordPress core won’t make all WordPress sites instantly faster, but it will help give every site owner the opportunity to reduce bandwidth by uploading images using the new WebP image format.
As Sarah Gooding reported for WP Tavern last month:
This modern image file format was created by Google in September 2010, and is now supported by 95% of the web browsers in use worldwide. It has distinct advantages over more commonly used formats, providing both lossless and lossy compression that is 26% smaller in size compared to PNGs and 25-34% smaller than comparable JPEG images.
In that report, she noted that only 1.6% (now at 1.8%) of the top 10 million websites used the WebP format for their images. With WordPress now adding support for this new format, that percentage is likely to rise in the coming years.
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