Christogenea Website Images

We have recently had several inquiries from readers who could not see the images on our website. Perhaps two months ago, endeavoring to increase the speed of our website, we switched to a newer image format for many of our images. That alone improved page load speed by nearly 2 seconds which is a lot in the world of the internet.

Decreasing the amount of time it takes our pages to load, we also hope to rank higher in search results, as well as lessen our total bandwidth usage, an excess of which may increase our hosting costs.

The new image format is really already a couple of years old, and is called WebP. These images have a .webp file extension. They are usually at least half the size of equivalent .jpg and .png images.

But because the format was developed by Google, Apple was reluctant to support it. Now they have relented, and Apple has stated that it will support WebP images beginning with Safari version 14.0, which is just starting to become available. Firefox, Chrome, Brave and Opera already support the new format.

William Finck