WordPress - WebP and AVIF image formats

An introduction to image optimisation in WordPress Northern Ireland

Image Optimisation is an increasingly important step improve page speed and search engine performance of your WordPress website. Having a lot of unoptimised image can slow your website and increasingly Google has used website performance, and more specifically image formats as a marker.

WebP and AVIF are a new generation image formats that compresses images without losing quality. There are a number of WordPress plugins that can be easily set-up to help your website transition tot the new formats without having to manually edit images yourself.

Plugins

W3 Total Cache + Image Service API → wordpress.org

W3 Total Cache (W3TC) improves the SEO, Core Web Vitals and overall user experience of your site. It includes the Image Service API extension provides WebP image format conversion from common image formats (on upload and on demand)

Converter for Media PRO → mattplugins.com

Converter for Media from Matt Plugins offers one click conversion of images on your website to both WebP and AVIF (pro version). Images converted to AVIF have better quality - the colours look better on them than on WebP.

WebP Express → wordpress.org

The plugin uses the WebP Convert library to convert images to webp. WebP Convert is able to convert images using multiple methods. With little effort, WordPress admins can have their site serving autogenerated webp images to browsers that supports it