Photon Adds WebP Support for Faster Loading Images

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.