When aMiSTACX released our S3 Titanium plugin for WordPress back in mid-December, a little known BIG feature that we kept quiet was the fact that we introduced the use of Google’s WebP image compression for media hosted on S3 when using our S3R-Alpha module.
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 is currently supported by Chrome, FireFox [65+], Opera, Pale Moon, and Microsoft’s Edge. [Leaving Apple’s Safari as the last major holdout – but who really cares?]
WebP Performance
“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.
Lossless WebP supports transparency (also known as alpha channel) at a cost of just 22% additional bytes. For cases when lossy RGB compression is acceptable, lossy WebP also supports transparency, typically providing 3× smaller file sizes compared to PNG.” Source Google Developers
The S3 Rocket Advantage
aMiSTACX made it easy to serve images with WebP image compression. Just flick the switch to “ON” and sync with S3. All images will be converted to WebP. But don’t worry, the original images are kept intact, and we utilize them as fallback should the client browser not be able to handle the modern WebP format. So you can have your cake and eat it too!
aMiSTACX will continue to offer performance-enhancing modules for WordPress and Magento. So stay tuned!
Weaponize your Business with aMiSTACX! and a little bit smaller 😉