🔒 EXCLUSIVE: Support/w total cache/pagespeed tests/webp - Collection

In this Google PageSpeed Experiment, we’re testing W3 Total Cache’s WebP Converter tool to understand it’s impact on website performance.

Our goal is to assess how this specific feature influences website speed.

Control Website

For our control website, we created a brand new WordPress installation and made no changes to the default options. There are no active plugins and we are using the default Twenty Twenty-Four theme.

For our test we uploaded and added 6 images to the sample “Hello World” post.

Control Website: https://wordpress-speed-test.com/041524_site1/2024/04/15/hello-world/

Experimental Website

On our experimental website we installed another brand new WordPress site making no changes to the plugins or theme, and we added the same 6 images to the “Hello World” post.

We also installed W3 Total Cache Pro, enabled the WebP Converter extension, and converted the 6 images to WebP format.

Experimental Website: https://wordpress-speed-test.com/041524_site2/2024/04/15/hello-world/

Experimental Website Changes

WebP images can provide significant savings in terms of file size compared to JPEG and PNG, leading to faster website loading times and reduced bandwidth usage.

On our Experimental site we activated the WebP Converter tool and allowed it to auto-convert all of the images in our media library. The screenshot below shows the media library and the file size reduction on each image.

As you can see, we were easily able to reduce the size of our media files by 65% on average.

This significant reduction of file size might raise questions about how this affects the image quality. According to Google WebP typically achieves an average of 30% more compression than JPEG and JPEG 2000, without loss of image quality. With this and our average of 65% reduction in mind, we did a side by side comparison between on of our test images on our control site and the converted version of the same image on our experimental site. We found that the converted image was much smaller and loaded faster with no change in quality.

How the test was run

We conducted six tests on each website using the Google PageSpeed test and averaged all the scores.

Test results