Better Quality WebP Images

Currently, WebP files are generated from already compressed & optimized JPG thumbnails. To have reasonably sized JPGs, to use as fallbacks for WebPs, most users would keep the quality setting to a lower setting (80-85). However, this means that the WebP optimization is done to thumbnails that have a lot of JPG compression artifacts, so you don’t really gain WebPs better compression/optimization benefits as much.

If the JPG thumbnails that are used to generate the WebP files were created using the highest possible quality settings (95+), the resulting WebPs would be much cleaner. And, since they wouldn’t be re-compressing all of the JPG artifact ‘noise’, they are sometimes even a tiny bit smaller (and def not bigger) in filesize.

But for the JPGs to still operate decently as a ‘fallback’ image, they may need to be ‘recompressed’ afterwards to a reasonable quality setting so they wouldn’t be huge. Not sure how much longer JPG fallbacks will even be necessary, but probably still a good idea for them to be decently optimized if used in such a fashion.

ALTERNATELY: I’m not sure if this is even possible, but if the WebPs could be generated from the original full-size uploaded file, with the thumbnail resizing being part of the optimization process, they could bypass using the resized JPG thumbnails altogether.