This issue notification means that at least one internal URL on your site contains images in old formats (BMP, JPEG, or PNG).
What Does “Serve Images in NextGen Formats” Mean?
There are old image formats and modern formats. Of course, the new generation formats provide the ability to publish images of better quality. For example, AVIF and WebP are image formats that have excellent compression characteristics.
Encoding pictures in these formats, rather than JPEG or PNG, will cause them to load faster and consume less data. Accordingly, your site will load faster, which will positively impact search engine rankings.
Read more about other factors that affect content loading speed on website pages on the MOZ blog or learn more in this video.
What Triggers This Issue?
A warning about this issue will be triggered during a site scan if at least one internal URL is detected that contains images in the old BMP, JPEG, or PNG formats.
The user will see a list of pictures that you can optimize without losing quality simply by switching to the new WebP format.
How to Check the Issue?
To check if your site has old-format images, use one of the tools to analyze your site and look for issues interfering with search engine promotion. Crawler or another tool collects all the links from your site that contain BMP, JPEG, and PNG pictures and then suggests react converting them to WebP.
You should get a detailed report with a list of images that you can optimize and thereby increase the speed of your site.
Our Site Audit tool highlights crucial image optimization opportunities on your site, such as serving images in next-gen formats. These modern image formats like WebP or AVIF offer better compression and quality characteristics compared to traditional formats like JPEG or PNG, which can significantly speed up your website’s loading times. By addressing these issues, you’ll ensure your images are up to speed with the latest web standards, enhancing user experience and potentially boosting your SEO ranking.
To see exactly which pages need attention, just click on ‘View issue’. You’ll see a detailed list of URLs that are using older image formats. Each URL is accompanied by specific details such as:
Page Weight: This is a metric indicating the total size of the page, which can impact loading times.
Status Code: It shows the HTTP status code for each page, with a ‘200’ code indicating that the page is successfully loading.
Issue Found Date: This date stamp tells you when the issue was detected, helping you to keep track of when the problem first appeared.
By clicking “View images,” you can see exactly which images need updating to next-gen formats.
Maximize Speed with Image Optimization!
Audit your site for next-gen image formats and enhance user experience now!
Why is This Important?
Obsolete image formats cannot provide good compression and high-quality level as the new generation formats do.
It is positively affecting both the user experience of your site and the indexing process. Images and other content directly affect the site’s loading speed, which is a significant ranking factor. To make sure your site loads faster and heavy content isn’t the cause of slow speed, you need to optimize your pictures. Using JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP formats gives the site owner the ability to optimize the images on the site.
How to Fix the Issue?
To fix the issue with serve images in next-gen formats, you require converting the images on your resource to the new WebP format. Search engines recommend using the new popular format displayed by most browsers on mobile devices and desktops. By converting to this format, you can shrink the image by 25-50%.
- Use the tool to convert all your images to the new format.
- Use Node.js to convert JPEG / PNG images to WebP.
- Manage WordPress plugins and .htaccess to optimize and maintain your images.
Despite this issue, you can also use backup versions of JPEG / PNG. It applies if you know there are users whose browsers simply do not support WebP.
