You Cannot Enable WebP with WordPress in 2018

So you heard about WebP and its incredible compression factor? You want your WordPress blog to benefit of a good Google ranking? Solutions exist to allow WordPress handle WebP images, unfortunately it’s useless as WordPress won’t be able to resize them to create the thumbnails used everywhere.

Did You Try to Upload WebP Into WordPress?

WebP is a next generation image format spearheaded by Google since 2013, which provides advanced compression options. While it is so much better than legacy formats, it is only supported at the moment of writing (February 2018) by Chrome, and Opera on desktops and Android (see Can I use WebP image format? for more details). As of today, Firefox is not scheduled to support WebP in future versions. Neither are WordPress nor Joomla.

Have you tried uploading one in the media area? So you must be familiar with this error message:

When it comes to new technologies such as WebP images, you are pretty much on your own. Following this blog advices (and some others), I sorta “enabled” WebP images for WordPress.

Want to enable WebP in WordPress? You Can’t!

Beware, this is useless. For demonstration purpose only. Because yeah, sometimes one just want to lose its time ????

Follow these steps:

1. Unlock unknown content upload (I have no idea how insecure this bad idea is):
   define('ALLOW_UNFILTERED_UPLOADS', true);
2. Hook WebP uploads with a custom function:

   function my_custom_upload_mimes($mimes = array()) {
   
     // Add a key and value for the CSV file type
     $mimes['webp'] = "image/webp";
   
     return $mimes;
   }
   
   add_action('upload_mimes', 'my_custom_upload_mimes');

3. Add the plugin WP Add Mime Types to let WordPress know that it’s an image. Not sure it’s necessary with the hook function.

Indeed you will need to use Chrome to log in the admin area, as Firefox still refuses to implement WebP. You can verify here that it’s not on the roadmap even up to version 61.

Result? Well, it just doesn’t work. The images are uploaded, but do not show up. That’s because WordPress do resize the images you upload to create many thumbnails used everywhere, in the posts, featured images, media admin area etc.

And indeed, neither WP nor PHP can resize a WebP image, as of today.

My take: WordPress is like Mozilla, they refuse to follow Google due to silly fights or “didn’t-do-it won’t follow you” bullcrap. What a shame. Now I’m being a bit of a bully here, but I think they should at least consider using the new image formats of the future instead of just ignoring them. That is: JPEG-XR and WebP.

It’s 2018, @$#$%!!!

Enable WebP with nginx

Here is the idea: since neither WordPress nor Joomla do support WebP, the serving of these images has to be delegated to the web server. We are to implement a rewrite for jpeg/png/any format you like, to serve the same file name appended with the extension .webp.

Source: centminmod.com

As I recently switched to nginx for the better, I’m not interested in Apache anymore. Nginx is the future. This is why I’ll show you how to do it with nginx only.

GO TO THE METHOD HERE