If you’ve been taking a look at Google PageSpeed Insights lately, you may have received the “Serve images in next-gen formats” issue as an opportunity for Website Speed improvement.
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This issue is a part of Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) which’s a Core Web Vitals Metric. And as Google announced that Core Web Vitals is a Google ranking algorithm from May 2021. So it’s much important to improve LCP score.
Telling you that formats like JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP download faster and they consume fewer resources than JPG or PNG.
Well yes: we are about to see a radical leap in a type of file whose formats have not changed for decades, something unusual in a world like digital.
But the time has come: if you had not heard of WebP and company, from now on you will have to start adapting your website, because images with next-generation format have already arrived.
Well, in this article you will learn how to do Image optimization for fixing the “Serve images in next-gen formats” issue.
The webP image format is best from Next-gen Image formats. Also, WordPress 5.8 will speed up websites by supporting the WebP image format. So consider using WebP image format as Next-gen Image formats.
So Let’s learn first…
What is the WebP format?
It is an image file format developed by Google that offers extremely high lossy and lossless image compression for use on the web.
An image in webP format can weigh up to 40% less than the same image in JPEG while maintaining perfect display quality.
This means that, without quality loss, we can offer a great visual experience on our websites while achieving fantastic performance and loading times.
The webP format was developed by Google in 2010 and has yet to achieve a global rollout despite its benefits.
Advantages of webP
- Smaller image file sizes/weight
- Any format can be converted to webP
- Higher quality than other formats, despite a lower file size
- SEO improvements by achieving lower page load times
- Compared to JPEG its weight is 35% less
- Compared to PNG its weight is 45% less
Top Plugins to fix the Serve images in next-gen formats issue
The plugins that you will find below have the main task of reducing, serving Images in Next-gen formats, and compressing the weight of images in WordPress:
1. Imagify – Optimize your Images & Convert WebP
With Imagify you can massively reduce the weight of your images with a single click. The free version allows compression of up to 25MB per month for free.
In this version, the conversion of images to WebP format is also included. That will fix your Serve images in next-gen formats issue. The good news is that you can convert images in WebP format for free.
To use Imagify, you have generate API key that you will get through a email. Very simple.
To convert and serve Images in WebP, go to Optimization section and enable this option:
Among the options that you can find in Imagify to optimize your WordPress images, you will find:
- Normal optimization: with this option, you can compress your images without losing quality.
- Aggressive optimization: with this compression option through a lossy algorithm, you will be able to optimize your WordPress images with a small loss of quality.
- Ultra optimization: it is the most aggressive option. It also uses the lossy algorithm, but in this case, the loss of quality in the images is more noticeable.
With Imagify you will not only be able to optimize the weight of images, but you will also be able to resize them to the size that your website needs.
All the functions that it has and that it is free (up to 25MB / month) make it one of the best plugins to optimize images in WordPress.
2. WebP Express to convert and serve in WebP
WebP Express is another plugin that I like to fix Serve images in next-gen formats issue, but in this case, it is free and only serves to convert to WebP. After activating this Plugin, it will setup all necessary setting automatically, no need to configure it.
Once the conversion begins, it will take more or less time depending on how many images we have. Although it is not the slowest, it is not the fastest either.
Another good thing about WebP Express is that it offers us the possibility of carrying out certain tests to check if the plugin can read and write correctly in the folders used for the conversion.
3. WebP Converter for Media to convert and serve in WebP
The first free option to convert our website images to WebP is the WebP Converter for Media plugin. After activating this Plugin, it will setup all necessary setting automatically, no need to configure.
At the end of the configuration screen, we have the “Regenerate All” button, which will allow us to convert all the images on the web to WebP.
The good part of this plugin is that its configuration section is easy to understand and has few options.
4. EWWW Image Optimizer
EWWW Image Optimizer is a mythical plugin to optimize images in WordPress. You can get automatic WebP image format conversion with Easy IO (image Optimization). Otherwise, you can generate WebP versions of images with the Bulk Optimizer, and deliver them to supported browsers.
This is a paid Plugin:
It is a particularly interesting plugin to minimize the weight of images, thanks to its perfect compression function, that is, it compresses the weight of the image without losing quality. With EWWW Image Optimizer you can also resize your images.
Some of the main features of EWWW IO are:
- There is no limit to the weight of the file you want to optimize.
- You can compress any file that is in JPG, PNG, GIF, or PDF format.
- All original images will be available for 30 days in case you want to restore the original version.
In short, EWWW Image Optimizer is a very good plugin to eliminate the excess weight, size of images, serving Next-gen image formats that will speed up your website.
How to Enable Webp format uploading in WordPress?
Currently, WordPress does not support WebP format image uploading yet, however, it is flexible enough to add this support through code. By enabling WebP image format uploading in WordPress, then you can easily upload WebP images.
Different WP plugins allow you to enable the webp format uploading on a WordPress website, however, we will see how to do it through code.
Add this code to the end of your functions.php file by Going Appearance ➔ Theme Editor:
function webp_upload_mimes( $existing_mimes ) {
// add webp to the list of mime types
$existing_mimes['webp'] = 'image/webp';
// return the array back to the function with our added mime type
return $existing_mimes;
}
add_filter( 'mime_types', 'webp_upload_mimes' );Conclusion
We learned many methods to Optimize images to fix Serve images in next-gen formats issue. Hopefully, now this issue is no more pain for you.
Image Optimization is an important part of on-page SEO. And also for speed up your website. Google’s Core Web Vitals update shows that faster Websites perform better than slower Websites. So fix your all Core Web Vitals errors as soon as possible.
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If you have any question, then don’t hesitate to share thoughts in the comment box. We will help.
