Most pages now have at least a few photos or illustrations. Each blog entry is varied with the main photo and graphics or infographics. It is interesting but dangerous. Websites have more and more graphics, but the classic formats of graphic files (photos and illustrations) make the website heavy and slow to load. We can compress them, but then they will lose a lot of quality, which will make them illegible or cause pixelation (visible pixels). This is the reason why new solutions are still being sought to facilitate it. One of them is WebP – a new graphic file format that allows you to save the file in high quality (resolution), and at the same time significantly reduce its weight.

Why is .webp better than .jpg?

Files with the .webp extension are slowly replacing classic formats such as: .jpg, .png or .gif. Why? Because they are better in many ways.

• They are lighter. A file with the .webp extension can be up to 35% lighter than a .jpg. Some believe that it is possible to reduce this weight by more than half. This makes pages lighter and easier to load.
• They have high quality. A .jpg or .png file can be saved so that it „weighs” several times less. However, this is where so-called lossy compression comes in. The image loses quality and becomes illegible. .webp files are lightweight but still high quality.
• They are transparent. What .jpg files lack (although .png files do) is transparency. If there is no background in the .jpg image (e.g. in a model of an object), a white background will appear after saving the file. .webp files do not do this.