Page weight kills conversions. The average WordPress site ships ~2 MB of images per page. Half of that is unnecessary.

The format hierarchy

Use this rank order, top to bottom:

1. AVIF — smallest, supported in all modern browsers since 2023. Use for hero images and large photos.
2. WEBP — universal support, 25-35% smaller than JPEG. Default for everything.
3. JPEG — fallback when WebP and AVIF are off the table.
4. PNG — only for logos, icons, screenshots with text. Never for photos.

Recommended settings

• WEBP at quality 80: indistinguishable from original for 99% of viewers, ~30% smaller than JPEG quality 85.
• AVIF at quality 60: very small files, takes more CPU to encode but renders fast.
• Strip EXIF on every output — removes the camera fingerprint and shaves 10-50 KB per image.

Step-by-step

1. Drop your images into the converter.
2. Pick WEBP as target format.
3. Set quality to 80.
4. Tick "Strip EXIF metadata".
5. Download the ZIP. Upload to your WordPress media library.
6. In your theme, use <picture> elements with AVIF first, WebP second, JPEG fallback.

A note on lazy loading

Convert + serve the right format, then add loading="lazy" to every below-the-fold <img>. Combined, you'll cut First Contentful Paint by 1-2 seconds on most pages.

What about the original JPEGs?

Keep them somewhere. WordPress's media library doesn't replace originals when you upload optimized versions — and if you ever need to re-export for print, you want the raw file.