On August 30, 2024, Google announced that its search engine and its different platforms, such as Google Images and Google Discover, are now compatible with images in AVIF format.
The AVIF format allows compressing images even more than other modern formats like WebP. However, there can be cases where WebP may perform better, so testing is recommended. In a test we did for a photo gallery on a tourism site, we were able to reduce the size of all the images from 550 kB to 338 kB.
Why is it important for the tourism industry?
Tourism industry websites use a lot of images to illustrate experiences, hotel rooms, meals, and much more.
For this reason, using the AVIF format can help reduce the weight of the images, speed up the webpage loading, and improve Core Web Vitals metrics.
How to implement AVIF images?
The AVIF format is already compatible with modern browsers, so there should be no loading and visibility issues while users are browsing.
However, it is not recommended to modify all the images on the website, as deleting old images would result in traffic loss on Google Images or presence in search engines, as Google would find non-existent images.
Instead of that, I recommend the following:
- Not all images require modification. Instead, prioritize those that are large or photos that illustrate your product or service.
- Generate a permanent redirect from the old images to the new URL with the image in AVIF format. In this way, search engines will be able to re-crawl the image.
