Image format and SEO

    Do you believe that using the right image format can influence your website's SEO. From JPEG to AVIF, from PNG to Webp, the options are very appealing.

    How do you deal with it? Is it helping you gain more traffic?

    Yes, definitely. It will affect your website mainly in two ways

    1. Page loading time

    2. Image compatibility

    If you use a new generation image format like webp, the size is small, the clarity is good. Google likes both. webp is already supported by most leading browsers. When your site loads fine and it loads fast, Google is going to like it.

    Google is always a big supporter of fast loading pages and high quality images. This is a big maze for webmasters. Mainly because size and clarity are often hard to keep up with at the same time.

    Merits and demerits of AVIF format

    They say AVIF image format helps reduce the imaze size by 50%. That makes your web page much lighter and faster compared to PNG.

    The downside is that not all website supports AVIF (AV1 image file ) image format.

    What is AVIF format?

    AVIF is based on AV1 video codec. Looks like it takes more time to create an AVIF image compared to other image factors.

    Also, considering AV1 is a video codec, some people believe that is not the best for non moving images, with possible less quality image generation.

    It is possible that AVIF images take more CPU power at the reader end badly influencing the reading experience if the visitor is on a low end machine.

    Browser support for AVIF

    The latest versions of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari supports AVIF format.

    More details

    Let us take a few old time and upcoming image formats

    Conventional image formats

    Why use them? Because they work on almost all web browsers and image viewers.

    1. PNG

    2. JPG

    3. GIF

    New image formats

    The new image formats are often embraced for their low image size abilities

    1. Webp - supported by Google, light weight

    2. AVIF - very light weight, less browser support

    3. JPEG XL - less browser support, learn more

    4. SVG - vector image file format, allows zooming without loss of clarity

    5. HEIF - works well for image sequences, photo bursts and live photos

    High Efficiency Image Format (HEIF) - AVIF is based on HEIF

    6. HEIC - Apple uses it for iPhone and iCloud

    This is wonderful. Imagine how many formats GIMP 2.99 now supports. They already have support for cursor files.

    I tried adding an AVIF here. But it is not supported. Says not a valid extension. Also, .jxl , the image viewer has no idea what it is. JPEG XL will really need some platform support and time before becoming mainstream.

    For now, Webp looks like the best solution. It supports both static and animated images.

    Google now have an official resource about how to use images the right way

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