Many factors contribute to making your webpage or content rank high on SERPs, including using quality images. Still, we are all familiar with the fact that too many images on your website can result in slow loading, which reduces your chance of ranking high on Google.

If you want to handle this problem by reducing the quality of the image, you still have the same result. Indeed, this problem has affected many web designers, causing Google to create WebP.

What are the major benefits of WebP images?

WebP is an image format created by Google, existing since 2010 and launched in 2011, to provide quality and lossless image compression for images, but the images still retain their quality. WebP, unlike other image formats like JPEG and PNG, reduces the image size, but you still have the quality you initially wanted.

WebP is a slow-growing image format, unlike its competitors, JPEG and PNG, and also not very popular. It was initially not supported by many browsers but had since been developed, and now several websites and browsers are supporting it, but not as much as JPEG or PNG. Despite its apparent advantages over them (JPEGs and PNGs). Below are some of the advantages of webP:

1) Faster loading times: the number of images on your site is one factor that affects your webpage loading time, too many images make your site load slow, and a slow-loading webpage reduces page visits and bounce rate.

Because most visitors are not patient and quickly leave a slow-loading page. The slow loading is because of the image size or amount of bytes, but when you try to compress, it can reduce the quality making your page look low and ranking low. WebP image formats and compress the images but retain their quality.

Compression in images is of two types; there is a lossy compression and lossless compression. Lossless compression reduces the size, and there is no data loss, while lossy compression reduces the size, and data is lost, reducing the size and quality.

WebP gives a better lossy and lossless compression than its competitors, but the codec ensures no loss of data or image quality with a reduction in size.

1. Low storage space: Due to the enhanced compatibility of the web image format, the reduced size results in the images taking up less storage space.

2. Transparency and Animation: Transparency is the ability of an image format to create uneven borders on a shape to see the background behind the shape and create depth and contrasts in the image. Image formats like PNG do transparency but not animation; GIFs can easily do animation. WebP image format can perform both transparency and animation, giving it an edge over other image formats.

Conclusion

There are many benefits of web images, some of which have been explained, but others are metadata, color management, and improved size quality with better customer conversions. WebP images have many advantages and disadvantages, as not all browsers use them.

Although the number is steadily growing, that does not change the fact that using webP image format gives a better result than other image formats.

To take advantage of WebP images for your website, contact an award winning Gold Coast web design agency, who can also help with WordPress development and Gold Coast eCommerce site design.