Long story short – WebP is an image format that compresses images without compromising quality. This image format is being heavily supported by Google in an effort to “make the web faster.” Because the internet is such a visual medium, it is important to fill your website (personal, business, or blog) with beautiful, eye-catches images. They sell more products. They keep people engaged. However, high-quality images are large, and they load slowly.
Page speed and SEO
Society as a whole is an impatient lot. If your website doesn’t load quickly, chances are your potential audience will move on. Compressing these images without losing image quality is huge! Additionally, Google has indicated that site speed is a part of the algorithm it uses to determine where you site shows up in search. Slow sites can be indexed poorly.
Should I use WebP to compress the images on my site?
To answer that question, you need to know where your website stands. How fast is your website? If site speed is super slow, WebP might help. However, it is not the only thing that can be done to increase your rankings. There are several things that one can do to improve rankings. If you are curious about your website’s search engine optimization, check out our free analysis. We can provide you with a clear picture of where your website excels and where you can place your time and effort to improve your visibility online.
Interested in the technical details of lossy or lossless WebP image compression? Google’s developer documentation explains in far more detail how the process works.
