Shifter supports the WebP media format in environments where Media CDN is enabled. Simply enable Media CDN, and Shifter will convert your media to the WebP format without altering the original files.
What Is WebP?
“WebP is a modern image format that provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web. Using WebP, webmasters and web developers can create smaller, richer images that make the web faster. WebP lossless images are 26% smaller in size compared to PNGs. WebP lossy images are 25–34% smaller than comparable JPEG images at equivalent SSIM quality index.” (from A new image format for the Web)
Benefits
Shifter delivers content from the CDN edge location closest to your visitors. Enabling this feature serves JPEG, GIF, and PNG files in WebP format, allowing you to optimize your website’s load time without additional coding or plugins.
How to Enable WebP on the Shifter Website
The Shifter Media CDN feature can be enabled for Shifter sites on Tier 1 plans and above. To enable it, follow the steps in the support document Shifter Media CDN.
Once Media CDN is enabled, Shifter transfers all media in the WordPress Media Library to a dedicated CDN. It converts JPG, GIF, and PNG files to WebP without changing the filenames (including extensions). You can export the original files at any time.
When Shifter receives a request from a supported browser, it delivers the media in WebP format.
Web browsers that support WebP
- Desktop
- Firefox version 65 or later
- Google Chrome version 32 or later
- Microsoft Edge version 80 or later
- Opera version 19 or later
- Safari version 16 or later
- Mobile
- Google Chrome for Android version 25 or later
- Native web browser, Android 4.2 or later (JB-MR1)
- Safari on iOS version 14 or later
Since Safari does not yet support this file format, please use a supported browser to verify WebP functionality.
For more information on supported browsers, see Google’s documentation “ Which web browsers natively support WebP?” and “ Can I use WebP image format?.” How to Check if a File Has Been Converted
Check the request headers in a supported browser, or
Check the request headers in a supported browser, or use the cURL command with the -H ‘Accept: image/webp’ option.
When Media CDN and WebP are disabled
Shifter returns image/jpeg. The Content-Length is 26897 bytes, which is the size of the file.