True webp Support/Usage

I feel a little cheated by the recent upgrade that added webp/HEIF support. Webp support won't actually be a helpful feature until that's the format accessible by WordPress (at the very least as an option).

While it's marginally convenient in special edge cases that I can upload webp files to my properties' photos, OwnerRez seems to be immediately be converting them to jpg. The image carousel on my website is still displaying photos in the jpg format, so the speed improvements I was hoping to see are non-existent.

Virtually all browsers have supported webp for more than 5 years (Chrome has for almost 15!), so I don't understand why we're stuck using a 30-year-old, inefficient format.

I am experiencing the same problem.  I prefer to continue using my hosted site but need the end user experience improvements as this is directly impacting click-through and conversion rates. Need answers and resolution ASAP!

Thanks for putting this feature request together! These ideas grow when more voices weigh in, so if you know other users who'd find this useful, send them the link and ask them to upvote.

Community feedback really helps us prioritize what to build next.

Thanks for the detailed feedback, Elliot (and Sean, appreciate you hopping in too).

To clarify what's happening today, WebP/HEIF uploads are supported on the input side, but we convert to JPEG for the final delivered image. That's intentional. Browser support for WebP is broad but still not universal, and compatibility issues with newer image formats aren't hypothetical for us; we've run into real problems with HEIC in the past, for example. JPEG remains the safest common denominator across the wide range of browsers and devices.

On the performance side, WebP typically runs 10-20% smaller than an equivalent JPEG, so a 300KB photo might land around 240KB. That's real, but the impact on load time depends heavily on where the bottleneck actually is. Our property photos are already compressed, served in appropriately sized crops for where they're displayed and delivered through a global CDN, so the images themselves are loading in well under 50ms in most cases regardless of format. The kind of load-time or SEO impact WebP is known for mostly shows up when the alternative is multi-megabyte, uncompressed images served from a slow or non-CDN origin. That's not really the situation here, so the practical difference for most accounts would be marginal.

All that said - I'll leave this open for voting. For now, it's not something we have planned in the near term.