Help Centre

Images are what transform a website from a wall of text, into an experience. They’re key to creating a visual journey that helps you to tell your story and aids your visitors in visualising how your product or service can impact them. 

There’s one downside to using images. They need to be loaded onto your page for visitors to view them. When they aren’t optimised, they can be one of the largest components of your page that drives your loading speed down. 

This can be an unfortunate double-edged sword. You could have stunning images that inspire the people who visit your site. However, if your page doesn’t load fast enough, your visitors may never see your content before they get impatient and bounce. 

The other detriment this can have is on your website's SEO performance. Fast loading pages are more important than ever before and so, your pages may be impacted in the search results.

There’s a simple solution to this though that we’ve implemented for you. The answer is the WebP image file format.

What is WebP?

WebP is one of the latest new image file formats. It was created as a way to compress the file size of images without loss of quality so that they are optimised for the web. With better pictures of a smaller file size, pages can load faster without the demand of loading bigger file types like .jpg or .png. 

This means that whatever file format your image was originally, it can potentially benefit from being converted to WebP while still looking amazing. 

Our system will detect any images uploaded to Create that could benefit from being reformatted as WebP and take care of the optimisation for you. For any images that wouldn’t see a benefit from being reformatted to WebP, the system will leave them as is. 

There’s nothing you need to do with regards to this update as everything is handled by our system. You can rest assured that we will only implement WebP where your site will be positively impacted by the change, with no detriment to the quality of your images. 

One of the largest and most common improvements reported by page speed insights is to make the switch to WebP images so this update will shave valuable seconds off your page load time. 

With this being the case, there’s the added benefit that whenever someone loads your page on their device, the carbon footprint of your pages will be smaller due to having to load less intense resources.

We’re thrilled to be able to offer this across Create websites. With this update, we’re confident that your website will be loading faster, that it could see some benefit in search engines and that it’s a step in the right direction for the planet. 

If you’d like to take your image optimisations further, there are several more steps that you can take. We’ve outlined these in our blog on how to make your website more sustainable.