WebP is a modern image format that provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web. Essentially reduced file size without perceptible drop in quality. That in turn makes for a faster website.

Sites with large quantities of images and larger image sizes benefit dramatically. Opencart is no exception. Image quality can be imperative of sites such as photography, considerable care is taken to make their images look their best. Heavy compression can look very ugly. So it’s always a trade-off between file size and image quality. And it’s precisely at the intersection of those two things that the WebP format is targeted.

WebP typically achieves an average of 30% more compression than jpg / png images, without loss of image quality. The WebP format essentially aims at creating smaller, better looking images that can help make the web faster and in the future reduce your data storage.

Web was developed in 2010, its newly increased popularity is a result of its new owners Google. Google know SEO better than anyone else and it would be naive to think that they do not promote their own software, besides it is in their interest to so.

The biggest drawback of WebP is compatibility with browsers. Whilst it is widely supported on modern browsers like Google Chrome, Firefox, Edge and the Opera browser all support WebP, not all the versions. This has lead to various techniques in supporting both. The most simplest of which can have the opposite effect, retrieving both jpg/png and WebP and serving the WebP where supported. The drawback to this is whilst you will get good lighthouse reports for now by using their software, you will not achieve the desired goal of reducing your loading times.

Benefits of this module:

Only retrieve WebP images to WebP supporting browsers.
Retrieve supported images where browser does not support WebP
Converts all images including
thumbs
product Images
additional images
description images
html included css background-image

plus

stylesheet background-image support


** INCLUDES IMAGES ADDED VIA YOUR HTML EDITOR EG. PRODUCT DESCRIPTIONS / MODULES

This module adds Webp formatted images to your site, including images used in descriptions via the editor html editor etc. and serves original format images where the browsers does not support Webp.

All newly processed images will be automatic.
All previous images will be processed “on the fly”

Additional features :
Once all images have been created new ones will not be created
Individual images can also be uploaded or replaced for less compression higher quality - more compression greater speed - should you require it


Plug and play, no files are overridden
* php GD library required