Photon Adds WebP Support for Faster Loading Images

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Last week Jetpack announced that its Photon image service added support for the WebP image format, which provides up to 34% size reduction for served images when compared JPEG images of the same visual quality. For Photon users this translates into faster-loading pages.

WebP is not yet natively supported by all browsers, so Photon will auto-detect the visitor’s browser and serve the images in the best quality/speed possible.

I spoke with Jetpack team leader George Stephanis at WordCamp US about the improvements to Photon, and he broke it down for us in the video interview below.

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6 Comments


  1. So, is this done automatically or is there a hook or a filter that needs to be enabled?

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    1. Ignore me, I thought Photon converts the images automatically. That would be great!

      Instead, I have to use third-party plugins to do it.

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    2. With Photon enabled images will be automatically converted to WebP (when a browser that supports it requests your image) . All you have to do is upload your images to your post or media library and Photon will take care of the rest. Note: the file extension won’t change, only the MIME type, but it is indeed WebP

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      1. Thanks @Jesse.

        So I can’t actually check the source or the headers to see the change, can I? I tried with several images and they’re still JPEGs. Using latest version of everything and PHP 5.6.13.

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