Google WebP and Website Performance: What does this mean for the future of web?

Google has always been interested in speeding up the web. True to their motives, they have launched Google Chrome, one of the fastest web browser, they revamped their search engine algorithm and launched a new version called Caffeine. They also recently launched Google Instant which instantaneously displays results as you type. 

The latest news that is floating around the web is Google is planning to launch a new version of image format – WebP. The new image format, which is an open source format, reduces the size of a JPEG image by nearly 40% without affecting much of the quality. Google is assuring readers and experts alike that by adopting its new standard, searching images would yield faster results and thus creating smaller footprint of the image. 

According to Google, nearly 65% of all the data are images. Hence it considers this adoption a very important one and that all manufacturers of devices should consider. As the use of Smartphones are increasing steadily, accessing images from the web through these devices becomes even more critical. 

Google has already successfully implemented its own video format WebM for all its YouTube videos in addition to H.264. What does this all mean to web designers and website developers? Well for one thing, they need to make sure that their websites are compatible to these formats in the coming years.

Secondly, this means that this could vastly improve the responsiveness and accessibility of their website across various platforms to users. Thus, the quicker the images load, the quicker the website loads, the quicker the user gets to access its contents. It translates to faster load times, lower downtimes and increase in revenue. 

This is even more critical for advertising agencies who deal with online ad displays. The chances are that if they adopt these new formats, they could load ads faster, deliver more number of impressions and hence improve the revenue even a lot faster. 

Being a website monitoring service, we place a huge emphasis on your website performance and uptime. We believe that websites should optimize and make it faster for the user to access content. In case of WebP, if enough companies and manufacturers display their support for WebP, it could very well become the image standard for the Web.

While these discussions go on about new standards and formats being introduced, or how to improve web and make it faster, one un-deniable fact remains: you would always require tools to ensure that you stick to those standards to ensure high performance. Which is why, we at Site24x7, make sure that those website performance tools are available to you at all time. 

In the meantime, tell us what you think of this new image format from Google and its impact on the future of the Web in our comment section.