If you have not heard of WebP images and the advantages it has for the loading speed of your website, we tell you everything in this article. Read!
Importance of images on websites
It’s pretty hard to imagine a website that doesn’t have images, right? Images are a very important part of the web with which it is achieved that it is more visual, more attractive, more beautiful and allows to explain the contents better.
Just as the user values the images that are on the web, he values the loading time when he is visiting the website.
If the user takes a few more seconds to enter your website, we consider it lost.
Images and web loading speed are directly related. Images that weigh heavily and are not compressed will make your website very slow. To do this, there are different types of formats, and let’s see the one that Google has developed: WebP.
What is WebP?
WebP is an image compression format offered by Google. It is open source, that is, it can be used by everyone.
It is possible to reduce the image by more than 30% than other types of formats, without losing quality.
One of its most outstanding features is that it supports both lossy and lossless image compression. Others are the possibility of transparencies and animations.
Advantages of using WebP images
The goal of WebP is to reduce the size of the images to the minimum possible to upload them to a website and not have speed problems. It is perfect for photographs, images and small graphics and these are its features:
- Lossy compression can be carried out on images.
- Lossless image compression can be carried out.
- Perfect for images with transparencies.
- Metadata: This format may contain some metadata generated by some cameras.
- Embedded color profiles, to better define the color of the images.
- Possibility of animations by recording sequences of images.
What are the differences with JPG, PNG and GIF?
In the GIF format the images are compressed and have no loss of quality, which is a positive point, but, the color palette is reduced. Therefore, it is usually used in images with few colors.
The standard format and the most used on the internet is JPG, since unlike GIF, very good colors and shadows are achieved after compression, and in addition, different levels of compression can be achieved.
PNG is next to JPG, another and the most used formats and this one has two versions. One of them is 8-bit and compresses just like GIF, and another of them is 24-bit and you get a compression just like in JPG. In PNG it is compressed without losses, so it is used when there is no problem for having a very large file and in the case of logos.
In this case, the images in WebP compete directly with JPG, the most used on the internet. Thanks to WebP’s lossless compression capability, we upload images to the Internet without loss of quality and with space saving, which surpasses JPG.
In Close·marketing, WebP has become the new format we use for images on websites, to make sure that the loading time will be the minimum possible and optimize the web to the maximum.
Now that you know this new image format and the advantages it represents for the loading speed of your website, it is time for you to apply it on your company’s website, or tell us, had you already used it? We read you in comments.
