Why WebP is the Ultimate Image Format for E-Commerce
When it comes to e-commerce, speed is revenue. Amazon famously found that every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales. Since massive product images are the number one cause of slow load times on Shopify and WooCommerce stores, optimizing them is no longer optional—it's mandatory.
The Power of Next-Gen Formats
If you've ever run a Google PageSpeed Insights test on your store, you've likely seen the glaring red warning: "Serve images in next-gen formats."
Older formats like JPEG and PNG were created decades ago. WebP is a modern image format developed by Google that provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web. On average, WebP images are 25% to 35% smaller than JPEGs of comparable quality.
Core Web Vitals & SEO
Google directly factors page speed into its search rankings through a system called Core Web Vitals. The largest element on your page (usually your product hero image) dictates your LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) score. By converting that heavy 2MB JPEG into a lightweight 150KB WebP file utilizing our compressor above, your LCP score improves drastically, signaling to Google that your site deserves a higher rank.
Best Practice: Always scale your images down to match the maximum display width on your site (typically 1200px or less) before uploading them to your platform.