53% of mobile website visits are abandoned if users wait for longer than 3 seconds for a page to load, according to Google data. In the world of real estate websites, 3 seconds can potentially change a homebuyer’s decision or affect who a business wants to partner with.
It is critical for Xome® to display optimized high-quality images to our end users without sacrificing page speed. That’s where WebP comes in.
The WebP image format achieves this by maintaining the same quality as JPEG while being 30-40% smaller in file size. Our users can download images faster, especially in areas of the US where residents do not have access to fast broadband service. That allows us to enhance the user experience while lowering our operational costs.
This modern image format also supports advanced features like transparency and animation, enabling a wider variety of images that it is able to display.
Due to the many benefits that comes with using WebP, we evaluated and decided to adopt it before our competitors in January of 2023, when only 6.5% of all websites used WebP according to W3Techs.
Xome’s phased approach to WebP
Even though WebP is much newer than JPEG, it has been in development by Google since 2010. As of October 2024, only 13.3% of all websites have adopted WebP.
Additionally, Google widely uses WebP throughout its customer-facing websites, especially YouTube. This gave developers confidence that even though the technology was still quite new, Google believes in its own product. This is a good indication of WebP’s long-term reliability and future support.
When Xome evaluates different technologies for adoption, software is often introduced by our enterprise architect or another leading developer. That was also the case when the development team evaluated WebP for the Xome website. A few selected team members took a few business days to evaluate and set up their development environment for a dry run. The team then analyzed the pros and cons and came to a final decision to move forward with the adoption of WebP.
We started with a phased approach with first integrating WebP on secondary landing pages on our website, such as the Who We Are page. After confirmation of a successful implementation, WebP was then added throughout the rest of the site as time permitted.
How to work around incompatibility issues and development challenges
WebP can be used as much or as little as you want. The existing image formats can remain as they are, and developers can gradually replace images with the new WebP format. Also, the switch to WebP does not require any coding changes apart from renaming the image extension.
Despite the advantages that exist with WebP, there are several development challenges that remain when it is not supported by all browsers, platforms, and clients. However, the format is supported by the most popular browsers, such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Apple Safari.
Because of this, Xome did not have to create workarounds to get WebP images to work. When the website is loading in an unsupported browser, fallback images in JPG or PNG formats are used. For clients that do not support WebP, such as Outlook, we continue to use JPG and PNG formats.
As Xome moves on to integrating WebP for property images, there are concerns about image incompatibility issues. Images that come through data sources will have to be converted from JPG to WebP, but is not a long or complicated process.
Driving innovation with WebP in the real estate technology space
Xome’s application accumulates millions of images with dozens of images for each property listing. These photos are front and center and can be one of the factors that pushes a home buyer or seller’s decision.
After we fully convert and switch to WebP for property images, we hope to continue to improve the overall user experience while saving on costs and improving our data management efficiency.
The world of real estate moves fast and a house that was available this morning could be gone by this afternoon. WebP is one of the few image formats that can keep up with that type of demand for real estate websites, and we’re excited to be leading the pack in its adoption.
