According to Google, for every second of delay in mobile page load, conversions can fall by up to 20%.
For a website owner, the choice had always been either making images hi-res and suffer the dip in loading speed, or prioritize the conversion at the expense of making images ugly and over-compressed. This changes now.
AVIF is how we achieve it.
AVIF is a new-school image format designed to replace commonly used web formats such as JPEG and PNG. It supports transparency and boasts unprecedented compression ratios all while maintaining stunning image quality. We want to make the internet faster, and AVIF is a solid step in that direction.
While WebP is developed by Google, AVIF is made by a non-profit.
Which browsers support AVIF?
Chrome and Opera support AVIF since 2020. Every major browser on both desktop and mobile supports it since at least September 2024.
If you want to target older devices, WebP is here to save the day. It's worse than AVIF, but it support transparency too, and is still miles ahead of JPEG.
Can you spot the difference?
Let's convert a JPEG from a Canon DSLR to AVIF and see what happens.
JPEG
5,108 kb
AVIF
57 kb -99.8%
Yes, AVIF is really 89 times smaller. Yes, that's less than 0.02% of the original. Pretty much every image straight out of the camera will yield the same results.
Low-quality pics from the internet that were already compressed will have a slightly lower ratio, but the difference is still significant: