How to Use and Serve WEBP Images in WordPress

WEBP is one of the most effective ways to speed up your WordPress site without sacrificing image quality.

Developed by Google, this modern image format delivers high-quality visuals at a fraction of the file size of JPEG and PNG, helping your pages load faster, improve Core Web Vitals, and boost SEO rankings.

From WordPress 5.8 onward, you can upload and use WEBP images just like any other format—but to fully optimize performance, you can also enable WEBP fallback redirection on Cloudways.

In this article, you’ll learn what WEBP is, why it matters for your website’s performance, and how to easily serve WEBP images in WordPress for maximum speed and compatibility.

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WordPress website speed is highly dependent on the size of the images because images typically account for 50% of an average web page's size.

Therefore, if your website uses heavy images with no optimizations, it may slow down your website speed and affect SEO performance.

Reducing the size of the images and optimizing them not only helps you save space but significantly improves your website's speed.

This is where an image format called WEBP comes to the rescue. Many websites have adopted WEBP format to improve website speed and performance like YouTube and eBay.

WEBP is a web image format developed by the web performance team at Google.

It was developed to offer high-quality and rich images in a smaller size than popular image formats like JPG, JPEG, and PNG.

It takes these popular formats' best features and qualities and combines them with superior lossless and lossy compression.

According to Google's WEBP compression study, WEBP images are 26% smaller than PNGs and 25-34% smaller than comparable — while keeping the same quality, JPEGs.

WEBP is already powering many of the sites of companies like YouTube and eBay.

WordPress 5.8 includes support for the WEBP image format. From WordPress version 5.8 forward, you can upload and use WEBP images in your WordPress application like you would use JPEG, PNG, and GIF images.

The visitor's web browser must support WEBP for it to work. WEBP images are supported by popular browsers such as:

To reiterate, WordPress 5.8+ supports WEBP format by default; therefore, you don't need to install any third-party plugins to upload WEBP images.

You can convert your images and upload them to your WordPress Media Library the same way as JPEG, PNG, and GIF formats.

Many plugins meet your needs to help convert your individual image in an ongoing manner and batch-convert your entire WordPress Media Library to the WEBP format.

The best part about these plugins is that they also support WEBP fallback redirection which means that it provides the original image as a fallback if a visitor's browser does not support WEBP format.

Let's assume you upload a PNG file to your website; the plugin will convert the PNG file to WEBP and serve the WEBP version of the image to the visitors using compatible browsers.

If the visitor's browser does not support WEBP images, the plugin will display the original PNG file.

Here's a list of the best and popular WEBP WordPress plugins:

You need to enable WEBP redirection for your WordPress application using the Cloudways Platform. Enabling it will allow your installed plugin to implement WEBP fallback redirection. By default, WEBP redirection is disabled.

You have now successfully enabled WEBP redirection for your desired application.

For fast WordPress hosting to load images and multimedia at lightening speed, use Cloudways, a Managed Hosting platform.

That’s it! We hope this article was helpful.

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