Use These Tips for Optimizing the Loading Speed of Images
Images are essential for most websites; can you imagine a food blog without images? The only problem is visitors can wait forever for your site to load if you don't optimize your images. They won't wait long either; three seconds is most people's limit. Google's WebP image format is an alternative format for JPEG images which significantly lowers the image file size with no loss of quality. Google developed WebP losless and lossy image formats in 2010 to replace PNGs and JPEG images respectively. They acquired the technology after purchasing On2 Technologies.
Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and the Android browser support WebP images; Apple’s Safari and Internet Explorer do not. You still have to serve JPEGs and PNGs to visitors with a website that won't support WebP. You have to use a plugin of you want to serve visitors to your WordPress website WebP images since WordPress does not support WebP by default. There are several to choose from, but after compressing your images, you may notice a decline in your site's ranking. This is temporary as anytime you change images, even if you don't change the image name, Google has to index them again.
Plugins which allow you to serve WebP images to supported browsers include WebP Express plugin and ShortPixel. WebP Express plugin automatically generates and serves WebP images while serving JPEGs and PNGs to unsupported browsers. ShortPixel is an image compression plugin which offers bulk optimization.
Image optimization usually offers the largest savings in load speed. If you don't want to use WebP images, you can still optimize your JPEGs and PNGs by resizing your images or compressing them. Since page load speed is a ranking factor, optimizing your images is more important than ever. It also keeps people from abandoning your site before it finishes loading, which will give you a high bounce rate. For more information click here https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/ccqn15/sitetrafficdown70afteroptimizingimages_tifu/.