From GIF to WebP: image formats and SEO

When you perform on page SEO optimizations, one of the basic issues when it comes to WPO or page performance is the size and weight of the images.

It is not an issue that should be overlooked, because it directly influences ranking factors such as loading speed and, ultimately, user experience.

Throughout this post we will unravel the main image formats that are commonly used, when it is best to use each of them and the new formats -capable of offering compression without losing quality- emerged with the need to improve SEO performance, such as WebP or JPG2000.

Actually, anyone with a basic knowledge of the Internet is used to dealing with .jpg or .gif files, for example. But... Do you know what their differences are? When is it convenient to use one or the other?

Let's look at them one by one.

One of the veterans when it comes to digital imaging. Its name comes from the acronym Graphic Interchange Format and is characterized by:

Its main virtues can be, at the same time, its disadvantages. The limited palette means that images representing reality (such as a product, a portrait, a landscape...) do not offer the minimum quality required.

Animations, which are still commonly used in social media or in the creation of banners for display campaigns, are quite clumsy for web, and there are other more interesting alternatives to the use of animated GIFS.

Even so, without being optimal for SEO, it still has its use in details such as logos (or similar elements with few colors) that "float" over other images.

This format, which stands for Portable Network Graphics, shares many characteristics with GIF with certain nuances, but also has some that make it unique:

We should use PNG when we want to incorporate to the page small simple graphics or illustrations with a limited amount of colors and that require transparency (logos, buttons...).

It is not the right format for photographs because, as in the case of GIF, it will not give the visual result with a minimum quality, and it will also have an excessive weight penalizing the loading speed and, by extension, the SEO of our eCommerce.

Actually, it is spelled both ways and its name comes from Joint Photographic Experts Group.

It can be considered as the standard among digital image formats because, as you can imagine, it is specially designed for the representation of images with photographic quality.

Unlike GIF and PNG, it is an ideal format for detailed photographs of any eCommerce. Although the compression usually affects quality, we have tools that optimize the photographs without affecting their quality.

This is a relatively old format, like all the others mentioned above. Aware of the need to update to the reality of new websites and the different media, they launched a version called JPG 2000 really optimized. A new format that differs from the previous one in aspects such as:

Basically, what it gives us is a higher quality ratio with a contained weight, which is ideal both from the prism of SEO and design and user experience.

If JPG 2000 is the evolution, we can say that WebP is the bet for an image format for web especially focused on SEO. In fact, its name already gives us a clue, but any doubt is immediately dispelled when I tell you that Google is its brand new owner.

If you want to tinker with WebP and do your own tests, you have several online converters that you can use for free like this one that, as an additional advantage, allows you to save the settings to convert different photos with the same parameters.

Seen this way it seems the best option, doesn't it? Surely it will be in the short term, but right now it has some drawbacks, such as not being 100% compatible with some browsers like Safari (although the iOS 14 update already provides support for this new format).

Another problem you will find is that you cannot edit them with PhotoShop directly, they need a plugin to do so.