Using webp format for images - has anyone incorporated them into a project?

Jon White asked on June 7, 2021 11:38

Hi,

I was wondering if anyone has successfully incorporated using webp images in their project and could tell me how they did it?

Webp seems to be being pushed by Google and even though it's been around a long time I feel having seen the impressive compression and file sizes (with not very noticeable quality reduction) I'd like to start using them, with a fallback to JPEG.

My issue is that webp is less user friendly to convert (Photoshop doesn't have it added) so currently I can manually convert using command line which for the content creators is not ideal for them. The issue would be that say for example you used a news page type and wanted a main image you'd have to have two image fields surely? One for webp and one for jpg? then pull them in with img srcset fallbacks or something. Or, is there a way that in MVC/Kentico you can convert to webp automatically when adding a standard jpg?

If anyone has any advice then it's be appreciated.

Thanks, Jon

Recent Answers

Dmitry Bastron answered on June 7, 2021 17:28

Hi Jon,

Unfortunately, there is no support for webp from Kentico just yet. If you feel it's necessary please feel free to raise this as idea on their roadmap page here. I've posted this as a feedback a few times in the past, but if there will be more voices needing this feature I'm sure it will be implemented.

However even without Kentico's implementation of webp support there are a couple of things you can do still:

  • Implement image optimization, here and here are the articles how I've done it. It will still remain JPG or PNG, but will be much more optimised and quite close to webp (at least google page speed will stop deducting the score, but will still be showing you the warning on images)
  • Make use of the CDN for images. Some CDNs like Cloudflare allow image optimization on the fly. You simply turn this feature on the CND and it will start optimizing and caching the images coming from your website.
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manuel calvelo answered on October 29, 2021 15:56

You don't need a lot of voices for this. You just have to start realizing that you're loosing competitiveness. Not supporting Webp is just putting yourself out of competition. Might as well us WP

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