Our current recommend is not to use WebP.
- is not supported by all major browsers
- is often a larger file size than properly optimized JPG
- takes up additional disk space (1 webp per jpg, including thumbnails = you double your disk space needed for images)
- provides no tangible performance benefits
- does not impact pagespeed score (pointless optimization warning)
- you can score 100/100 on pagespeed insights without WebP
- introduces a number of other issues (changes DOM structure, introduces DOM nodes)
- makes no difference when images are lazyloaded (95%+ of recipe images)
We will not be supporting WebP for the foreseeable future, as it provides no tangible benefits and introduces unnecessary complexity.
Why is it being pushed?
It's a format developed by Google that they're pushing as... self promotion is my best guess.
Their initial claims were that it produced smaller images, but this has not panned out in the real world.
It's also being pushed by image optimization plugins because it introduces a new potential revenue stream for them.
Peter says
Hello,
I am looking to use webp images with the feast plugin and I came across this article. It has been 3 years since this article was originally written and in meantime, webp has been accepted and supported by all browsers today. Also, I found that webp image size compared to jpg is much smaller producing much better quality. I am wondering if you still recommend jpg over webp and if so, I wonder why? I did try to upload webp images to Word Press media library and it had no problems with it.
Thank you so much!
Skylar says
Our stance is still that there is absolutely no tangible benefit to using or support WebP. Real world testing shows that webp offers no tangible benefit in terms of file size and quality over other formats like jpgxl, avif or traditional jpgs.
WebP is a technical solution to a business problem that doesn't exist. It's a solution in search of a question. It's a waste of time to even think about.
We've seen exactly 0 food blogs where image filesize or quality are a bottleneck if following our guidelines at https://feastdesignco.com/image-optimization/
If images become a real bottleneck for your business, we recommend hiring https://nerdpress.net/ to manage Cloudflare polish.