If your site feels slow, look at the images before you blame the host. Big hero photos and blog pictures quietly wreck the first visit, especially on phones. WebP is one of those formats that just makes pages feel snappier.
You are not archiving museum scans here. You are trying to put a picture on a page that opens quickly.
Convert and check on your phone
- Open Optimize for web, or Convert and choose WebP.
- Upload the original, download the WebP, swap it into the page.
- Keep the original offline as your master.
- Load the live page on mobile data if you can. That is where the difference shows.
How much does it save?
On typical photos, WebP often lands maybe a quarter to a third smaller than a similar-looking JPG. Across a page with a hero and a bunch of article images, that adds up. People stick around more when the page does not sit there loading bricks.
Browser support has been solid for years. The remaining headaches are usually old CMS plugins, not visitors. Keep a JPG fallback only if some ancient system in your pipeline rejects WebP.
For logos with transparency, test on both light and dark headers. If your CMS mangels alpha channels, PNG is still the boring reliable choice for brand marks.