Why use SVG & WebP images in WordPress ?

Scalable Vector graphics aka SVG’s have been around the web for quite some time. There is no denying that they are the best form of image because they are scalable and you can implement logic inside them.

Let’s see why you should consider SVG & WebP for images, JPEG,PNG is good, the new formats are changing the web. Unfortunately, both are not supported in WordPress.

Let’s see why. I did a small experiment to check if SVG’s are actually useful ?

JPEG vs PNG vs SVG on a linear gradient image.

JPG 179kb vs Png 105kb vs Svg 844Bytes !

I also did an experiment on the SVG vs WebP .

Png 100kb , WebP 2.1kb, SVG 1.95kb

Even though these advantages are well known, they can not be uploaded into the WordPress media library directly. You’ll need to use a plugin like this to add SVG support and this to add webP support.


But is migrating from standard JPEG and PNG formats to WebP & Svg worth it ?

Verdict (in Caps & Bold ) : TOTALLY WORTH IT !

— Update [ 5th October 2020 ]

There is another new image format which has been introduced. Called “AVIF” , safari and ios currently do not support this format. However, it seems to have better image processing. So, for the same image size, the JPEG has less quality than WebP which has lesser quality the AVIF. The AVIF requires hardware support which is present in most current processors. However, from what it seems it might still take time for full adoption of this format. Read more below :

https://blog.cloudflare.com/generate-avif-images-with-image-resizing/

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