In case you’ve been living under a rock - Google wants your website to load faster!
They introduced their Core Web Vitals update, and the new mobile speed score became the most important metric for you to pay attention to for page speed.
One of the most common ‘opportunities’ for improvement that Google started to report is ‘Serve images in next-gen formats’
But a lot of our clients have no idea what that even means!
The compressed image formats we know and love, JPEG & PNG, do a good job of making images look good on our computers without being huge files to download.
But these formats were developed back in the 90’s (around 30 years ago, sorry folks)
Back when Microsoft Paint was the dominant image editor…
Since then, compression technology has improved, but we are still mostly using these trusty old formats
The main 3 types of NextGen Image formats are JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP. These formats make your image files much smaller and faster to load, while keeping the same quality levels.
Unfortunately, JPEG 2000 & JPEG XR don’t have much browser support, and webP is about 30% stronger at compressing, so I wouldn’t bother with them for now.
WebP is the clear hero of the Nextgen image formats, with 30% better compression and much wider support across the web browsers.
(And it was developed by Google, so they’ll always favour it)
But WebP still doesn’t have complete support across all bowsers, so if you use it exclusively, you could be serving broken images to 20-30% of your visitors.
So the best way to approach this problem in WordPress is to load up the images in the old trusty jpeg & png formats as a fall-back, then set the webP images to only be served to the websites.
This will mean that most mobile browsers will be served up a mich smaller, faster version of the image. This will improve the mobile user experience and improve your mobile speed score!
(And therefore, your SEO rankings and Ad cost per click)
Need help converting your websites image and optimising your websites load speed?
You can shoot an email to [email protected] or request a Conversion Audit.
Or if you want coaching and access to courses where you can learn how to do this stuff yourself, head over to Evergreen Profit
Chat soon 🙂
Created for businesses owners with any level of tech-experience, this simple audit will help you identify the areas of your website that are holding you back from growth. If your website isn’t performing as well as it could, this checklist will show you exactly where to start, so you can get more out of your marketing dollar.
