Should You Compress Your Images Before Converting To WebP?
I started one of the first solely analysis based SEO companies earlier this year, and that comes with its own share of scrutiny.
We have to do a LOT of R&D, testing to back up everything we say.
One of these topics we’ve been interested in has been compression. It’s a topic that in technical SEO circles doesn’t get a lot of attention, completely unfairly too.
It’s not that it’s hard to test, we’ll show you that in this article, it’s simply that a lot of people don’t see it as “that important”.
That’s complete madness. There are entire companies set up to deal with compression on the web. It’s vitally important for financial reasons, ranking reasons and more. This is super important!!!
While we don’t usually share our test data in public (it’s not our preferred way of teaching), this is one of those cases where it’s super easy to create a test.
You can even follow along with the links provided in the article if you’d like. 🥰
If you just want the cold-hard data, then, baby no worries. We got you boo.
Our findings:
See the table below to get a quick overview. Continue scrolling to see more of the details.
The JPG/JPEG Files:
Apologies for the shitty quality of these. I probably should have saved them as PNG. Or optimize them so Medium didn’t pixel-gank them or whatever.
I just wanted to make sure that these images hadn’t ever been used elsewhere, in case people had already compressed them, so I quickly threw it together on Photoshop for the purpose of the article.
I used a tool that is available for free online to do the compression so you guys could repeat the tests if you wanted… Check it here.
Uncompressed JPG/JPEG File:
Compressed JPG/JPEG File:
A decrease in size of 78.79%.
The WebP Files:
Unfortunately, Medium doesn’t support WebP. So you’ll just have to make do with the conversion screenshots instead 😢
I used a tool that is available for free online to do the conversions so you guys could repeat the tests if you wanted... Check it here.
Uncompressed JPG/JPEG File > WebP File:
A decrease in size of 63.48%, this is less of a decrease than compression achieved alone…
Compressed JPG/JPEG File > WebP File:
Both compressing and converting the file resulted in a 92.07% decrease in file size.
Conclusion
Our findings were pretty conclusive…
- Compressing your JPEG/JPG is more important for size reduction than converting to WebP alone.
- A compressed AND converted JPEG/JPG can reduce the size of your file as much as 92.07% in our own case here.
Bottom-line: It makes a big difference.
You should be always be compressing and converting your JPEG/JPG files for maximum minification.
I hope you found this article useful. If so, be kind and give it a share!
Thanks,
Dan
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