Should we be counting on the WebP format in the future?

According to developers, 60% of a web page's loading time is taken up by images. To minimise loading times as much as possible, the tech giant Google developed a new format for images: WebP.

How can this new format help you guarantee better browsing on your website? Will WebP replace JPEG or PNG formats? Let us try to answer these questions.

WebP format — what is it?

Google drew on browsing statistics and developers' experience to try to address a recurring issue: web page loading times. It goes without saying that the longer a site takes to appear on a user's screen, the greater the risk that they will leave the page and go elsewhere. There is therefore a real incentive to revisit certain practices in order to achieve these goals, particularly commercial ones.

The purpose of WebP is therefore to offer a lighter format for your images while guaranteeing minimal loss of quality. According to Google, opting for the WebP format could reduce image file sizes by 20 to 65%, consuming less bandwidth in the process.

WebP lets you compress your images in two different ways: with or without loss. With lossy compression, you risk degrading the quality of your images. Without loss, they will be less "lightened" but you will have a better reproduction of all colours, retain good definition, and preserve transparent backgrounds, for example. It is therefore up to you to choose and decide whether it is better to reduce the file size as much as possible at the risk of losing quality, or to find a middle ground and opt for compression with limited loss.

The limits of WebP

Or rather, the "current" limits — since the format is becoming more widespread and the issues encountered at the time of writing will probably be resolved in the months and years to come.

While this format is presented as more advantageous than the well-known JPEG, JPG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, and other formats, it is not yet usable everywhere. Having been in development for a good number of years at Google, it is nevertheless not supported by all browsers, for example. No problem on Chrome, of course, nothing to report from Opera, Firefox has just adopted it… But that is not the case for Safari, the world's second most widely used browser, which does not yet support this type of format.

It is also important to know that several image editing software packages, such as Adobe Photoshop, do not natively recognise the WebP format. You may also encounter difficulties with the world's most popular CMS, WordPress. You will need a plugin to be able to handle this type of format.

In summary

As you will have gathered, WebP is on its way to becoming a standard format, delivering good results in terms of browsing speed. While it still has a few limitations in its use today, we remain convinced that it is only a matter of time before most web solutions implement the necessary support for this format.

As with any compression method, you will experience some quality loss — that is inevitable. But for the vast majority of users, this will ultimately be barely perceptible. Unless you are an image or photography professional, WebP could well become your ally.