WordPress 5.8 arriving in July 2021 will speed up websites by supporting the WebP image format. Users can upload and use WebP images in WordPress like they would a JPEG or PNG image.
What is WebP?
WebP is a next-generation image format that provides improved lossless and lossy compression for images on the web. WebP images are around 30% smaller on average than their JPEG or PNG equivalents. Smaller images take less bandwidth to transmit. Finally, WebP is supported in all major browsers.
WordPress announced this support, saying,
“From WordPress version 5.8 forward, you can upload and use WebP images in WordPress like you would a JPEG or PNG image today (as long as your hosting service supports WebP). Switching to the WebP format for your images will improve your site’s performance and your site visitor’s experience.”
How to use WebP images?
WordPress 5.8 cannot currently convert images to WebP. Image editing tools support exporting in WebP. Furthermore, WordPress users can also command-line conversion tools or web-based tools like Squoosh. Once you save your images as WebP, then you can upload them to WordPress and use them like you would any other image.
In the future, WordPress has plans for support of WebP image conversions at the point of upload. This means a publisher can upload a JPG image and choose to convert it to WebP.
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