Support for .webp

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  misterbumpuk · Member · Dec 3, 2020 at 1:41 pm

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  There are several posts in these forums about the use of the .webp format, but all appear dated and closed for further replies.

  Now that the last major browser supports this format, are there any plans to revisit this question?

  Or, are you entirely dependent on wordpress.org?

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  staff-totoro · Staff · Dec 3, 2020 at 9:56 pm

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  Hi there,

  We actually do support WebP on WordPress.com sites currently, as you can see here: https://wordpress.com/blog/2015/12/04/webp-images-support/

  To clarify, you can’t upload a .webp formatted file, that is not accepted in the media library. So you will need to stick with more common image formats like .jpg and .png.

  However, on our end, when we serve your site to the visitor, we check to see what browser they are using and if it is compatible we send the images as WebP format (we perform the image conversion on our end) to offer the best loading speed possible.

  Hope this helps!

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  misterbumpuk · Member · Dec 4, 2020 at 6:30 am

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  Thanks, Jerry. Yes, I picked this up from other documentation. This is all good, but my expectation would be that the media library supports the uploading of .webp files.

  How the image is actually sent down the wire when it is requested is largely semantic. Okay, it matters from the WordPress perspective, because it makes the page more performant, but it doesn’t really matter from the content creator’s perspective.

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  misterbumpuk · Member · Dec 4, 2020 at 6:40 am

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  My other observation is, “why does WP *not* allow this format to be uploaded?” given that it is now a format supported by every major browser.

  I can accept that there might be some implementation delay, but I would certainly expect it to feature in WP’s plans.

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  kokkieh · Staff · Dec 4, 2020 at 8:49 am

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  Hi there,

  You can see a good explanation of why webp is not yet natively supported in WordPress here:

  https://wordpress.org/support/topic/add-support-webp-format-imge/#post-11346998

  It’s not yet supported, because the PHP libraries on which WordPress depends hasn’t supported that image format until very recently.

  The Core team is currently working on adding support for that image format, and it looks like this is planned for version 5.7 due out next year:

  https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/35725

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  misterbumpuk · Member · Dec 4, 2020 at 12:52 pm

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  Right. Next year. That was all you needed to say! Thanks.