
So while it certainly has majority support, that 5% is a minor hurdle, especially when it’s Safari users on older macOS versions. In total, around 95% of Internet users use a browser that supports WebP. However, IE usage has shrunk to less than 1% of total internet users. Internet Explorer also lacks WebP support (but Edge supports WebP as it’s based on Chromium). iOS and macOS Safari ( macOS 11 Big Sur and later only)Īt the time that we’re writing this post, Safari supports WebP images only partially.WebP images are supported by popular browsers such as: Unfortunately, while browser support has grown a lot, WebP compatibility is still not universal. If you want to learn about the WebP compression techniques in detail, this article is a good starting point.įor WebP images to work, a visitor’s web browser needs to support them. Lossless WebP uses a much more complicated set of methods that were developed by the WebP team. Predictive coding uses the values of neighboring pixels in an image to predict values and then only encodes the difference. With lossy compression, WebP uses something called “predictive coding” to lower the file size. So how does Google’s WebP format achieve these reductions in file size?įirst, it supports lossy and lossless compression, so the exact reduction will depend on whether you’re using lossy or lossless compression. That’s the reason why if you run your site through PageSpeed Insights, one of the many recommendations is to Serve images in next-gen formats like WebP: Google PageSpeed Insights suggests using WebP images 26% smaller than a comparable PNG image.25-34% smaller than a comparable JPEG image.By reducing the size of your image files, you can still give the same experience to your website’s visitors, but your site will load faster.įor example, in Google’s WebP compression study, Google found that a WebP image file is on average: WebP focuses on delivering the same image file, just with smaller file sizes. Note: Check out how different image file types can impact the speed of your website.

For example, you have image formats like JPEG or JPG and PNG. So, what is a WebP file? In a nutshell, WebP is an image format developed by Google to optimize images better than popular image formats (at that time).
