High-resolution images often make a website great, but they also slow it down. As most website’s page size is mostly made up of images, optimising those images is the easiest way to speed up the page; and we all know that faster websites sell better and rank higher on search engines.

However, with optimisation can come blurry and poor quality images. Most websites use jpg and png image formats which can be optimised pretty well, but there is now a new image format available from Google called webp. Webp can achieve the same image quality as other formats while often being half the size – that’s a big opportunity to massively improve your websites speed and rankings.

Webp has been around for a while, but it was only last year that Apple browsers started supporting them, meanings its now mainstream.

If you optimise your images, you will certainly improve your website speed and your Google PageSpeed scores, which will improve your organic rankings resulting in more traffic.

You need to put this on your websites development road map.

Sellerdeck Desktop’s latest versions (v16.1.0 and v18.1.0) now accept webp images when selecting files, but more importantly, it automatically uploads them if found in generated layouts. This supports image optimisation libraries where a single source jpg at a larger size is converted to an optimised webp image at an appropriate size for the page layout. The other item that is now supported in 18.1.0 is the srcset attribute, used to specify a range of images appropriate for mobile and desktop browser sizes – this reduces downloaded data on mobile. Multiple images are picked up from the srcset attribute and are uploaded, as well as the “acatalog” folder being inserted correctly.

If the above paragraph doesn’t make much sense, don’t worry, the key point is that with this image technology your website will be faster, rank better and gain more traffic. If that’s important to you, contact us and we’ll talk you through your options.