Webp Image questions

We have six stores, with lots of product images and a few variant images. We want to have optimized page load and would like our product/variant images which are all .jpg and jpeg format to be .webp images.

Can someone answer the following questions:

  1. Chatgpt says that Shopify automatically converts jpg images to webp for browsers that support that format. Is this true?
  2. If the above is true, is there a performance penalty for the conversion, and should we convert all our images to webp ?
  3. Chatgpt also says that Shopify will no longer accept webp as an image upload format, I had code that worked to create a webp image but it no longer does, I just get a null image. Is this true, i.e. that Shopify will no longer accept webp as an image upload format from the stated uploads resource_url?

Thanks for any help.

I would also recommend looking at Shopify help docs to confirm your information as ChatGPT can make things up and hallucinate, and these were v searchable

The docs state:

  1. The image format will be used in Shopify Admin, however for a customer looking at your website if their browser supports WebP it will serve that up https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/online-store/images/theme-images#automatic-image-compression-and-format-selection

  2. Shopify will do this itself, I don’t think you’ll see any performance penalty here for a customer looking at your site as that would undo all the benefit of using WebP

  3. Shopify does accept those file types for manual upload https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/products/product-media/product-media-types#images

If you are using staged uploads that doesn’t support WebP right now Manage media for products

Jordan thanks so much!

Floyd