What’s the benefit of serving images in webp or avif formats?
Asked on Sep 21, 2025
Answer
Serving images in modern formats like WebP or AVIF can significantly enhance website performance by reducing image file sizes without compromising quality. This leads to faster load times and improved user experience, which are crucial for optimizing Core Web Vitals.
Example Concept: WebP and AVIF are next-generation image formats that offer superior compression compared to traditional formats like JPEG and PNG. WebP supports both lossy and lossless compression, while AVIF provides even better compression efficiency, resulting in smaller file sizes. These formats help reduce bandwidth usage and improve loading speeds, especially on mobile devices with slower connections.
Additional Comment:
- WebP is widely supported across most modern browsers, making it a practical choice for many websites.
- AVIF offers higher compression rates but may not be supported by all browsers yet, so fallback strategies are important.
- Using these formats can directly improve metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) by reducing the time it takes to load large images.
- Consider using responsive images with the "srcset" attribute to serve appropriately sized images for different screen resolutions.
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