WebP is a new image format developed By Google, it boasts a 26% reduction in image sizes for lossless images and a 25-34% reduction for JPEG images.

If we take the above image (JPEG image 500x500)

$ ls -alh assets/img/whyuno.jpg -rw-r--r-- 1 user staff 27K 5 Jan 15:20 assets/img/whyuno.jpg

The image is 27K, a manageable size for the Web, but what happens if our user is on a spotty 3G connection? Or our image is 1920x1080?

After conversion to WebP our image is 15K – a saving of 44% !

$ ls -alh assets/img/webp.webp -rw-r--r-- 1 user staff 15K 5 Jan 15:29 assets/img/webp.webp

(Safari Users you can’t see this)

Yet Safari doesn’t support WebP. Even Edge has had WebP support since November 2018, and Chrome in late 2012. It’s not even in the Safari Technology Preview.