WEBP: what it is and how it can improve the performance of your website

tishaislam33

Try to imagine the Internet without images, just words and texts everywhere. It would be quite tiring and not very enlightening, don't you think? The visual part is extremely important on the Internet, especially on a website. A web design without images would not have the same participation, since this type of content is also quite expressive. After all, images add more life to your website. Taking this into account and creating a lighter and more optimized format that can improve page loading speed on the Internet, WebP was created. There are several image formats available on the web and the most well-known are PNG, JPEG, GIF and others. If you have a website, you probably use images in these formats, right? However, it is possible to apply lighter images that help optimize your pages, which is exactly the WebP format.

After all, what exactly is WebP? In 2010, precisely on September 30, Google announced it. On that date, the world's largest search engine launched a new open source standard that allows 24-bit image compression on the web. After that, the format is also complemented by other features, including lossless compression, animations, and transparency (alpha channel). Chrome, Google's browser, and Opera have already supported the Special Data compression format since late 2010. Over time, other browsers began to also support the format, although only experimentally. The popularization of the Internet in the country was a slow process, in which connections were made through 14K modems.



Therefore, it was very difficult to open pages containing many images due to slow loading. Decades later, many servers still notice how image-heavy content still demands a lot and slows down the network a bit. The solution would be to use clearer images that would allow them to load faster, but, of course, without losing quality. JPEG, the most widely used format today, was a good alternative to reduce file sizes. On the other hand, quality was also lost. Thus, Google realized that the delays and failures were related to the loading of images. So the solution was to launch their own solution: the WebP format. How does WebP work? In a very simplified way, WebP uses predictive coding and encodes an image using compression.