To WebP or Not To WebP ... that is the question

[QuickRon]

Now that Miva supports WebP, I'm debating whether to change our product images (ie JPG) over to WebP. Our site currently has over 2,500 product codes.

I've been doing some research regarding benefits to SEO, and, other than speed enhancement, there doesn't appear to be any other SEO benefit. Maybe that Google may shower a bit of love on you because it's their format.

Also, all modern browsers support WebP, but not their "older" versions. And people are still talking about needing a "workaround" for WebP to be supported on those older versions.

Is anyone here changing over to WebP?
If so, are you using any workarounds for older browsers?

And, in general, what are your thoughts on WebP?

Thanks,
Ron

[ILoveHostasaurus]

I would not worry about it from an old browser perspective. The versions of browsers in question are so old, anyone running them would likely have been compromised and computer rendered unusable long ago, with the exception of IE11. However, the only version of IE11 still receiving updates are on a select few Windows Server versions no one is likely shopping from anyway. The consumer-facing versions of Windows that had IE11 support all went end of life a while ago, and were upgraded to Edge if they were kept up to date.

https://caniuse.com/?search=webp

Its benefits are speed-related, by way of smaller file sizes, which can impact SEO if the entire page load time is being taken into consideration. If your existing images are both optimized and normal size, you could be talking about extremely negligible gains. If they're not optimized, not using the Miva Merchant Image Machine to build smaller versions, etc. so you're serving huge files, the conversion would help quite a bit.

Another option is to use Cloudflare, which has numerous other benefits, and on the lowest paid plan can do auto conversion and caching of webp for static images, if the requesting browser, and the image file, are determined to benefit from the conversion. Our staff can help set up the plan for you. https://developers.cloudflare.com/images/polish/

[QuickRon]

Thanks, David!

Our JPG's are already optimized and we're also on Cloudflare ... I'll take a look at its auto conversion and caching of WebP feature.

[Leon]

Just one note, some email programs (such as Outlook 365 desktop), still do not support webp, so don't use them in your emails.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Well, most email clients block images anyway...and a lot of folks don't bother to allow them...so not using images in email in general is not a bad thing :)