WebP and AVIF: Modern Image Formats That Speed Up Your Site

22/07/2026

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On most websites, images are the heaviest part of the page — typically 50 to 70 percent of total page weight. If your site feels slow, look at images before you blame scripts or the server. And the fastest win with images comes from modern formats: WebP and AVIF.

What are WebP and AVIF?

WebP was introduced by Google back in 2010 and is now supported by every modern browser. On average it produces files 25–35% smaller than JPEG at the same visual quality. AVIF is newer, derived from the AV1 video codec, and goes further: in practice it delivers files up to 50% smaller than JPEG, especially for detailed photographs.

A concrete example: a 1200-pixel product photo that weighs 280 KB as a JPEG typically drops to around 180 KB as WebP and 120–140 KB as AVIF. With ten such images on a page, that is over a megabyte saved — one to two seconds of load time on a mobile connection.

Browser support

WebP works virtually everywhere: Chrome, Firefox, Safari (since version 14), and Edge. AVIF is supported by Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari from version 16. For older browsers you use a fallback via the <picture> element:

The browser first tries the AVIF version.
If unsupported, it falls back to WebP.
If that also fails, it gets a classic JPEG or PNG.

No visitor ever sees a broken image, while modern browsers — over 95% of traffic — get the smallest version.

How to adopt WebP and AVIF on WordPress

You do not need to convert hundreds of images by hand. On WordPress, plugins like Imagify, ShortPixel, EWWW, or Converter for Media automatically generate WebP/AVIF versions of your existing images and serve them to browsers that support them. WordPress has supported direct WebP uploads since 5.8, and AVIF since 6.5.

Outside WordPress, you can convert with Squoosh (free, runs in the browser), the cwebp and avifenc command-line tools, or services like TinyPNG and Cloudinary.

What to watch out for

Do not force logos and flat-color icons into AVIF — SVG or a well-optimized PNG is often the better choice there.
Do not crank quality to 100 — quality 75–82 for AVIF and 80–85 for WebP is the sweet spot where your eye sees no difference but savings are largest.
Keep your originals — always retain the source file; conversion is one-way.
Check your CDN — a good CDN caches and serves WebP and AVIF variants without extra configuration.

The format is half the job — hosting is the other half

Even the smallest image loads slowly if the server responds slowly. Combining modern formats with NVMe storage and a global CDN — included in all our hosting plans — gives the best result: images are served from the location closest to each visitor, already compressed and cached. If speed matters to you for Google rankings too, take a look at our SEO hosting.

In short: switch to WebP now, enable AVIF where you can, keep a fallback for old browsers, and let a plugin do the work. It is the highest-return optimization a site can get in a single afternoon.