WebP in Affinity Photo

[R C-R]

50 minutes ago, Burndog said:

They are the the determining factor if you have a website that you want to be successful. There is no argument to this. If your customers can't find you they you don't exist no matter how unfair you perceive the situation to be.

But is the use of WebP on your website in any way connected to how successful it would or could be? I rather doubt that is true.

[Burndog]

34 minutes ago, R C-R said:

But is the use of WebP on your website in any way connected to how successful it would or could be? I rather doubt that is true.

Google uses website efficiency as a key benefit to ones SEO ranking. So yes, it matters.

And as noted, your websites success is based on it being found via search engines, or if not, the site effectively does not exist. We're talking business, not a website of your puppy that only your family knows of.

Google is the 1000 pound Gorilla and there is no denying that their edicts are factors we need to consider, whether one likes it or not.

 

[carl123]

9 minutes ago, Burndog said:

Google uses website efficiency as a key benefit to ones SEO ranking. So yes, it matters.

 

You are getting hung up on what is a very small ranking signal. Especially where WebP is concerned

From Google...

The “Speed Update,” as we’re calling it, will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of queries. It applies the same standard to all pages, regardless of the technology used to build the page. The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal, so a slow page may still rank highly if it has great, relevant content.

[R C-R]

From a "big picture" standpoint, I think all of the following deserve at least some consideration here.

• What fraction of existing & potential Affinity users are likely to use the software to create web content?
• Of that fraction, how much of that content would materially benefit from using lossy or lossless WebP format?
• What fraction of potential Affinity users won't buy Affinity software unless or until it does support exporting to WebP?
• How many web pages actually deliver WebP formatted content to supported browsers?
• Among those that do, to what extent does that determine the popularity, success, or some other metric of the site's value, both to site owners & to end users?

Obviously, there are no definitive answers to any of these things, so it is all guesswork....

[Joachim_L]

From time to time I make some images for the company website, using webp and jpeg as a fallback. For the webp images I use a tool for batch converting the jpeg. I believe that nearly no software can do all the work you want to be done. So I have no problems using extra tools. Only speaking for me Serif should concentrate on the more desperate needed features/functions, which can not be substituted by extra tools. 

[R C-R]

2 minutes ago, Joachim_L said:

Only speaking for me Serif should concentrate on the more desperate needed features/functions, which can not be substituted by extra tools. 

I that agree that this should be their top priority, second only to fixing bugs, particularly those that affect the stability of the apps.

To me, there is nothing worse than an app that crashes, losing what could be hours of work or in the worst cases resulting in corrupted files that can't be used at all.

[All Media Lab]

4 hours ago, carl123 said:

Not true, if another standard is proven to be equal to or has a better efficiency than WebP Google could not configure its algorithm to give better rankings to websites using WebP.

Google is constantly being sued for unfair/uncompetitive changes to its ranking systems.  

They can't just dictate "what is expected".

 

I agree!

Google measures the page loading speed in general (no matter if the faster page load is caused by the use of webp, minifying code, async loading of the scripts or what ever), so when you use webp with jpg fallback you have a 30 to 40% smaller bandwidth of the particular web page on almost all modern browsers except for Safari. The page speed advantage reflexes in the search results.  But like me lot's of people use Chrome or Firefox on their Mac. Nothing unfair or noncompetitive! Everybody is entitled to implement webp for free in their websites and use the source code in apps like the Affinity ones.  The problem is that there is no alternative at the moment for webp and works in most browsers. So Google is not dictating, but strongly advising in a smart way😉.

https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/docs/api

[R C-R]

5 hours ago, All Media Lab said:

... so when you use webp with jpg fallback you have a 30 to 40% smaller bandwidth of the particular web page on almost all modern browsers except for Safari.

Wouldn't the difference in page load times be true only for the part of the web page that includes WebP formatted content, & if all other factors like server response times & loads were equal? Even for that, 30 to 40% better times is probably a bit optimistic since the difference in file size for a given quality level varies greatly depending on the content of the image(s) & its compressibility.

I would expect the improvement to be greatest for pages with multiple high resolution raster images for users with slowish internet connections. Depending on the content, for users with fast connections the improvement might be too small to notice.

[Burndog]

Why are people that clearly have no idea of what webp is for commenting so much?
I don't mean to be rude but why are people clogging this thread with their uniformed comments that don't relate to the purpose of WebP and how it effects SEO and website use?

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, Burndog said:

I don't mean to be rude but why are people clogging this thread with their uniformed comments that don't relate to the purpose of WebP and how it effects SEO and website use?

Because there is more to it than just the purpose of WebP & SEO.

Also, the place for feature requests isn't here; it is in the section of the forum intended for that purpose.

[Fixx]

You know, Pixelmator Pro added WebP support in latest update 😎

[R C-R]

57 minutes ago, Fixx said:

You know, Pixelmator Pro added WebP support in latest update 😎

Yes, & with it a handy Quick Look generator.

[NoSi]

6 hours ago, Burndog said:

comments that don't relate to the purpose of WebP and how it effects SEO and website use?

To be honest, webp for me primarily is relevant because of SEO and website use. This is the reason why I miss it in Photo.

It is a matter of respect and consideration for my website visitors that I keep their data volume as small as possible, especially if they want to visit my pages with their mobile phone.

webp offers the possibility to save a lot of bandwidth with comparable presentation to jpeg or png. So a modern pixel graphics tool should support this format. 

Nobody here demands that other formats should be abandoned or replaced with it. It is only a matter of offering webp additionally, so that photo as a tool remains interesting for web workers.

[All Media Lab]

20 hours ago, R C-R said:

Wouldn't the difference in page load times be true only for the part of the web page that includes WebP formatted content, & if all other factors like server response times & loads were equal? Even for that, 30 to 40% better times is probably a bit optimistic since the difference in file size for a given quality level varies greatly depending on the content of the image(s) & its compressibility.

I would expect the improvement to be greatest for pages with multiple high resolution raster images for users with slowish internet connections. Depending on the content, for users with fast connections the improvement might be too small to notice.

I wonder why you say that..... based on? 

Hope you have access  to a Mac with Safari and or Xcode and a Chrome browser or any other browser that accepts webp.

Try this full-screen image system I developed my self with webp and jpg fallback based on: https://github.com/aFarkas/lazysizes. Open the dev tools and notice in Network that you save up to 60% bandwidth compare to the jpg (optimized with jpegMini) that are there for fallback. The issue is not only speed advantage, but also it saves energy in a huge way! And of course it's a SEO boost.

https://yourweblab.nl/kit/

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, All Media Lab said:

I wonder why you say that..... based on? 

It is based only on a few informal tests comparing opening web pages that have WebP content with JPG fallback on my Mac with Safari vs. with Chrome. So for example, using your URL in Chrome the WebP image image appears slightly faster in Chrome than the smaller JPEG does in Safari once the page begins to load, but overall Safari takes noticeably less time to load the page from the time I enter the URL in the browser until the page finishes loading.

Both browsers are the most recent versions available for Mojave. To the best of knowledge, nothing was cached prior to testing & the tests were as fair & unbiased as I know how to make them. For me, on my iMac (specs below in my sig) this is typically what I see, whether or not a page includes WebP content -- on average Safari loads pages faster start-to-finish than any other browser I have installed (Chrome, Opera, Firefox, whatever), which is why I use it almost exclusively.

Please understand that I am not in any way claiming my tests are definitive or that any other Mac user using a different Mac would see similar results. It is simply what works best for me.

Also, from what @carl123 wrote earlier, it seems unlikely this would have any appreciable effect on Google's SEO ranking.

[NoSi]

2 hours ago, R C-R said:

it seems unlikely this would have any appreciable effect on Google's SEO ranking.

I changed a website from jpeg to webp. Page Speed Insights elevated the result from 91/89 before to 99/100 (desktop/mobile) after. 

Because all other parameters kept the same I'd say it has a appreciable effect on Google's SEO ranking.

Testing a single picture is nonsense, because there are too many additional aspects involved - especially if it is done locally with the browser tools. Even a slight fluctuation of the connection is enough to get a completely distorted result. If you will achieve reasonable results with this method, then please repeat it 100 times, always clear the cache before and take the mean of that and – highly relevant – do it with the same browser.

But even then it has no real meaning to the average speed of a website. In my experience webp does impact this positively. In particular, this reduces the amount of data, which is a relevant cost factor for mobile devices and an advantage for slow networks/connections.

[carl123]

4 minutes ago, NoSi said:

I changed a website from jpeg to webp. Page Speed Insights elevated the result from 91/89 before to 99/100 (desktop/mobile) after. 

Because all other parameters kept the same I'd say it has a appreciable effect on Google's SEO ranking.

There is no direct correlation between Page Speed Insights and Google's SEO ranking.

I can get 100/100 results in Page Speed Insights using standard JPG files

[NoSi]

2 minutes ago, carl123 said:

There is no direct correlation between Page Speed Insights and Google's SEO ranking.

no direct correlation <> none.

3 minutes ago, carl123 said:

I can get 100/100 results in Page Speed Insights using standard JPG files

And I can get 50/50 results using webp only. [Holy crap – What is the point of this comparison?]

As far as I can remember weakly, the original intention was that Photo should support the webp format. What each individual then does with it is, objectively speaking, irrelevant for the time being. It's just that a now widely supported format (see a "caniuse" link in messages above) is ignored by Photo, which is incomprehensible.

[All Media Lab]

Hi @R C-R & @carl123

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/10/speed-up-your-website-webp/

Beter do your homework before making assumptions that are not true.

Web design and SEO are an important part of my profession!

https://moz.com/learn/seo/page-speed

Regards,

David

[NoSi]

@All Media Lab I didn't had those nice (english language) links describing it perfectly. And I didn't want to be so strict with the guys who argue past the actual topic. You made my day. Thanks.

[v_kyr]

• Why is Google’s New Image Format WebP So Critical to SEO?

[carl123]

3 minutes ago, All Media Lab said:

Beter do your homework before making assumptions that are not true.

Web design is my profession!

 

 

 

We all know that optimised images are always best practice when building websites but we were discussing whether a properly optimised website page would achieve any significant benefit in its SEO ranking if the images were switched to WebP images.

I have also met many people who say that "Web design is my profession!" some were good at their jobs and some were crap at their jobs. It means nothing.

[All Media Lab]

 

Will remove the link shortly!

[carl123]

1 minute ago, All Media Lab said:

You can have a look what my clients say here

Will remove the link shortly!

Thanks, but I have no intention of hiring you

I have heard enough already

[All Media Lab]

The problem is that you always have something to say, but no real arguments based on facts! Maybe it's time to not lurk around this forum all day and take a nice walk outside!

I know what I'm talking about and you proved to me that you  don't. If you don't want webp in Affinity fine! Some other people would be delighted when it was implemented in the export panel. I work with webp every day!