15 Best Image File Types Pros vs Cons of Each Format

Similarly most “GIF” sharing sites will attempt to use HTML5 video with a GIF fallback for browsers that don’t support HTML5 video. Speed test with compressed JPGsThere is almost no other optimization you can make on your site that will get you over 50% decrease in load times. That is why image optimization is so important, the process above was all automated by the plugin.

Since it does not discard information, PNG does not produce artifacts. Of course, this is at the expense of heavier image weight in the presence of many different color gradients, compared to lossy compression. With a usual 24 bit depth, it provides far more color resolution than the human eye can discern. It supports lossy compression by exploiting known mechanisms of human vision. Finding the best image format is just the first step of image optimization. There are many other best practices you can follow to improve image performance on your website, such as lazy-loading images and prioritizing them with Priority Hints.

It brings much higher efficiency in compression inherited from the use of AV1 intra-frame coding mechanisms. This lossless graphics format was developed to replace GIF, addressing its color banding issues. It was needed for images with a considerable amount of artwork, for which JPEG produced large artifacts even with minimal compression rates. However, GIF allows lightweight animation with universal support. This feature has kept the format alive until today in use cases not sensitive to quality issues, the most typical being small animated images with few or no colors.

If you use a larger dimension than necessary, you’ll be putting needless pressure on your site’s speed. Search engines hate slow sites, so they’ll absolutely love yours with its fully optimised images. You’ll get bonus points for saving all your images with relevant keywords so people can find your website by carrying out a Google Image Search too. While rarely the format of choice for static images, GIF has made a comeback as the #1 choice for sharing animations. We do a deep-dive and cover the pros and cons, browser and OS support, and ideal use cases for each format.

Tip 1: Reduce the number of images

One big benefit of alt text is the role it plays in helping visually impaired readers understand your content when using screen-reading tools. Performance is a key element in helping Google rank sites in search results. Google handles almost all Internet searches in the US, with about 88% market share. Depending on why the image is being served to the page, there will be different levels of acceptable quality. A high CLS score suggests that your site contains images without specified height and width attributes. Online Store OwnersOnline Store Owners It’s easy for anyone to start their own online store with Divi.

Some formats retain quality no matter how many times we duplicate the image, while we can save other formats on a transparent background for ease of use. The file format you select for an image will dictate the overall quality, the size of the image file, and the context in which you can use the image. You’ve probably heard of PNGs and JPGs before, but there are a few more you might be missing.

WebP image

Best for logos, text heavy/graphic designs, screenshots and anything that requires a transparent background. It’s not a web-safe image format, so it’s not supported by any browsers or standard image viewers or editors. Since they’re static, you cannot efficiently https://xcritical.com/ resize the images, the original design and pixels will simply get stretched to fill the extra space. This ends up creating a blurry, pixelated, or otherwise distorted image. The most common image formats for the web are all under the raster category.

However, a PNG file supports transparent backgrounds and retain overall higher quality images than JPGs for graphics due to lossless compression—you can save a PNG and not lose any quality. Vectors can be infinitely scaled without losing quality, making them ideal for high-resolution screens and varying sizes. However, vectors are not the best file format to save photos. It provides improved compression without sacrificing image quality. This means that HEIF can give you an image that is equal to JPEG but can be reduced to a smaller size, allowing for faster loading times. The lossy compression means that JPEG is a better option to use to showcase pictures throughout your content.

How to Disable WP-Cron (wp-cron.php) for Faster Performance

Mockup via BoxerX.Depending on the types of images you’re showcasing and the performance of your website, you’ll either use JPEG or PNG files. JPEGs are optimized for photography, and depending on the design of your portfolio, the lossy compression may not be an issue. PNG files will roughly double in size, but if you’re a graphic designer or are showcasing large images, the switch to PNG will be worth the trade-off in load time. Before we delve into specific file formats, let’s differentiate between the two most common types of image files — vector images and raster images. These files come in many formats and while you can often convert the initial file format into a different type, doing so is not always good.

Now, images are considered a pillar in website content and user-engagement so optimizing website images has become essential. As a general rule of thumb, if you’re using an image for your website, you should use some amount of compression. For JPGs, usually a quality between percent achieves a good balance. Programs like Adobe Photoshop offer tools to help you compress images easily. One behind-the-scenes best practice that is critical for a website’s performance and ranking is image optimization.

Regardless of the scalability of vector images, most images online are raster images. Most vector file formats aren’t compatible with standard web applications. Every file type stores information about an image in a different way.

Using SVGs: The Benefits You Need To Know

Compression is an important part of image optimization because smaller files use less memory space and allow your web pages to load faster. PNG uses lossless compression while JPG uses lossy compression. As a result, JPG tends to produce smaller-sized webp vs png images that facilitate faster loading. PNG images are higher quality, but they are also larger and may slow your website down. Pronounced “PING”, or simply “P.N.G”, this is a file format that supports lossless data compression.

• There are a host of tools, sites, and products aimed at making this process easier.
• This was reasonable back when it was created in the late 80’s, since the same limitation applied to existing displays.
• On the other hand, the popular JPEG image format does notsupport transparency.
• Running an A/B test is important because sometimes over-compression of images can hurt conversions.
• Malefactors can use image metadata to carry out security attacks, which is why any data provided by your users should be sanitized before being used in security-sensitive situations.
• What if you cached that file locally so that successive loads of Google’s search pages wouldn’t make you download the file every time you visit another page?

It’s simple yet easy to forget to do — and vital to a successful website. As a web consumer, you expect certain things from a website — ease of use, good design, quality images. When it comes to building one yourself, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by all the work that goes into making sure your site checks each of these boxes. And then there’s the task of actually getting it in front of viewers, all of which goes far beyond finding the right template or landing the right designer. Consider reducing the number of image files with CSS sprites.

More image compression tools that remove metadata

It will also scan images that you’ve already uploaded and reduce those too. Lossy compression algorithms remove both metadata and essential data , therefore they can achieve a higher compression ratio. While smaller image sizes improve web performance, lossy image compression does come with quality loss — for instance, you can end up with pixelated images. Most raster image formats you can use on the web are compressed formats. They are reduced in size by a compression algorithm , which removes non-essential and/or less important data from a file following pre-defined rules. SVG is an XML-based vector graphics format that specifies the contents of an image as a set of drawing commands that create shapes, lines, apply colors, filters, and so forth.

As a result, they usually generate larger-size files than lossy algorithms. However, there’s no loss of quality (this is why they’re called ‘lossless’) and the compressed image looks the same as the original one. WebP supports lossy compression via predictive coding based on the VP8 video codec, and lossless compression that uses substitutions for repeating data. Lossy WebP images average 25–35% smaller than JPEG images of visually similar compression levels. Lossless WebP images are typically 26% smaller than the same images in PNG format.

It means that multiple variations of a single image can be created, allowing the website to use these in the most optimum and efficient way. An Image CDN works by creating new image variations as they are needed. It can deliver hundreds of different image possibilities and does so in the most efficient way possible, creating an optimized consumer experience that also prioritizes speed. The High Efficiency Image File Format was first released in 2015 and was adopted by Apple a couple of years later. It supports image items, sequences, metadata, and more, and it uses both the .heif and .heifs file extensions. Also known as “Bitmap”, the BMP file format was created by Microsoft and is used on the Windows operating system.

How to view image metadata

Compress and reduce image data as much as possible without compromising acceptable quality. Images can significantly affect your site’s overall performance. To provide the best possible User Experience , you’ll need to ensure that your content is optimized for Google’s Core Web Vitals. We really would recommend investing time in image optimisation as it’ll not only benefit your site speed but your search engine optimisation efforts too. If you’re using a tool to reduce image size, be wary of things like aspect ratio. For text in images, tutorial screenshots, and when you want signs or other fine elements to be 100% visible in a photo, PNG is the right format.

Resize Images to Scale

It’s an onslaught of abbreviations that can be a little confusing if you’re not clued-up on the latest lingo. Raster formats are best used for images and pictures, while vectors are a great substitute for logos, icons, and digital graphics. PSD logoAs the name suggests, the PSD file format is an image format used for saving image documents and works in progress with Adobe Photoshop. Small file sizes and loss-free scaling for simple illustrations, shapes, and text. Most pages and articles use screenshots and images to enrich the text content.

We’ll then move on to to explore AVIF, and end with a summary putting all the main points together. These have only partial, but significant, support by major players among web browsers and mobile operating systems. After decades of the unrivaled dominance of JPEG, recent years have witnessed the appearance of new formats — WebP and HEIC — that challenge this position.

To determine image quality levels, consider running an A/B test to see what kinds of image configurations drive higher engagement and conversions. We’ve also talked about the importance of resizing your images for faster loading times. You can resize your photos on your computer before uploading them to your WordPress site. Another effective way to optimize images for web performance is to resize them. Typically, the larger the dimensions, the larger the file size.