What You Need To Know About WebP

WebP, introduced by Google, is an image format meant for the internet. While this format has been around for half a decade and is now five years old, it has not risen to instant fame and is yet to gain universal acceptance. That said, WebP does have a lot of uniqueness to offer, especially regarding image size and compression. It offers both lossy and lossless compression, provides better compression than both PNG and JPG, and supports lossless compression as well. So what does the WebP image format have to offer? In this article, we find the answer to this very question.
And JPG:

WebP Image Format: Introduction
In Google's words:WebP is a new image format that provides lossless and lossy compression for images on the web. WebP lossless images are 26% smaller in size compared to PNGs. WebP lossy images are 25-34% smaller in size compared to JPEG images at equivalent SSIM index. WebP supports lossless transparency (also known as alpha channel) with just 22% additional bytes. Transparency is also supported with lossy compression and typically provides 3x smaller file sizes compared to PNG when lossy compression is acceptable for the red/green/blue color channels.As we can ascertain from the description above, WebP is capable of better compression ratios than PNG as well as JPG, and at the same time supports transparency (JPG doesn’t, by the way). Naturally, on the internet, file size and compression matters a lot, so WebP apparently does seem to live up to its name of being a web-friendly image format.
Mode of Operation
WebP uses predictive coding to encode images -- if you have had any experience with the manner in which video codecs work to compress keyframes in videos, this is the same logic being applied in WebP image format. Predictive coding, in essence, uses the values of the nearby pixels to “predict” the values of a given pixel, such that it handles only the difference in such values, rather than full values. Sounds good, so far? Here is WebP image format in action.Samples
As compared to PNG, this is what WebP looks like:

“While this format has been around for half a decade and is now five years old”
That is what half a decade means. #redundant
As this is the web and we are not on Twitter we can easily afford that redundancy…
How can we configure WordPress sites to serve both jpeg & WebP images?