Hi @ibby,
This is Joseph from Imagify, and I’ll gladly assist you here!
I’m really sorry you’re having issues with this!
Generally, this means there is a conflict between Imagify’s “Use picture tags” option for WebP display and a lazy loading script being applied to your images.
To resolve this, you can try switching to the “Use rewrite rules” option in your Imagify plugin settings page as long as you don’t use a CDN, Cloudflare, or certain cache services like Varnish (as these conflict and may cause image display issues, especially in Safari browsers).
It’s worth noting that when using the rewrite rules option, the HTML code of your pages will still show the JPG or PNG versions of images, but the rewrite rules work in the background to actually serve the WebP versions.
You can follow the Rewrite Rules section of this guide to check that WebP images are being served: https://imagify.io/documentation/how-to-check-if-webp-image-is-displayed-on-your-site/.
If the “Use rewrite rules” option can’t work for you, then you could also try finding a different lazy loading service/plugin to see if it might work better with the “Use picture tags” option.
If not, then here is what I might suggest for you going forward:
In Apple’s Big Sur 11 update, they introduced support for WebP images in their newest version of Safari. Once this update is widely adopted by users and the older versions of Safari are no longer widely used, you’ll be able to safely link directly to your WebP images without the need for Imagify’s “Use picture tags” or “Use rewrite rules” options to provide fallback support.
I know there are some who have already made this choice, but many are also choosing to wait a while longer. When exactly support is widespread enough for you to make this change is a judgment call on your end (there will always be some small number of slow adopters still using older systems and browsers).
You can track browser support for WebP to help with this decision at https://caniuse.com/webp.
Please let me know if you have any further questions on this and I’ll be very happy to assist however I can!
Best regards,
Joseph
