It is simple. They can be half the size of jpg, all major browsers support them. What’s not to love?
Now if you have been reading you heard me say that part of the benefit of Rocket.net is its image compression automatically happening on the back end. That is true. Technically you don’t need an image optimization plugin, however, you do need to have the format in some format and if AVIF is superior then that’s what I want to use.
Now you may ask yourself isn’t this the same alternative image format as WebP? They are alternative image formats, but AVIF is much newer and fixes many WebP faults.
I am currently running the ShortPixel bulk process to convert all of my images into the AVIF format. I read one blogger who stated that the change from jpg to avif resulted in a 40% faster page download time. That is remarkable.
Also just as a note if you are a ShortPixel long-term customer like I am go to tools in the settings menu in ShortPixel and run migrate metadata. I had a warning (almost non-issue) and the customer service person said that when you migrate between web hosts you should do this as a maintenance task. I have switched between many hosting companies and never did that so I was long overdue.
JPG format has been a good friend over the years but it’s apparently time to say goodbye. I won’t shed a tear though because it has had its imperfections and problems. Occasionally they get corrupt and I’m not fond of the loss of detail and other weaknesses. In the tech world, nothing lasts forever and it’s had a good run.
Once this is done I will do a GTMetrix and expect the speed to slightly speed up. Without the need for compression by CloudFlare theoretically, it should be faster.