WordPress Performance Team Puts Controversial WebP by Default Proposal on Hold After Critical Feedback
WordPress’ Performance team has put its WebP by Default proposal on hold after the community voiced critical feedback and significant technical concerns. The new feature would generate WebP images on upload by default for new JPEG uploads and would use WebP images by default for website content. WordPress’ Performance team proposed this update for the upcoming 6.0 release. “The performance team has heard the feedback and takes the community’s concerns seriously,” Google-sponsored contributor Adam Silverstein said in an update on the status of the proposal. “With the help of the community, we will work on conducting additional data-driven research. Based on our findings, we will reassess our proposed approach to enabling WebP by default.” Vocal opponents to the feature characterized it as “heavy handed” and pushed for it to be “opt-in” only or introduced with a more user-friendly way to disable it. One of the chief concerns is that the proposal has the potential to double the amount of disk space used for images, as it would generate WebP thumbnails in addition to the JPEG sub sizes. Viktor Nagornyy summarized storage concerns in a comment on the proposal: This is not just about image formats. You’re going to drastically increase…
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