A Very WebP New Year from Cloudflare

Cloudflare has an automatic image optimization feature called Polish, available to customers on paid plans. It recompresses images and removes unnecessary data so that they are delivered to browsers more quickly.
Up until now, Polish has not changed image types when optimizing (even if, for example, a PNG might sometimes have been smaller than the equivalent JPEG). But a new feature in Polish allows us to swap out an image for an equivalent image compressed using Google’s WebP format when the browser is capable of handling WebP and delivering that type of image would be quicker.
CC-BY 2.0 image by John Stratford
What is WebP?
The main image formats used on the web haven’t changed much since the early days (apart from the SVG vector format, PNG was the last one to establish itself, almost two decades ago).
WebP is a newer image format for the web, proposed by Google. It takes advantage of progress in image compression techniques since formats such as JPEG and PNG were designed. It is often able to compress the images into a significantly smaller amount of data than the older formats.
WebP is versatile and able to replace the three main Continue reading