LiteSpeed stopped turning jpg’s into webp’s

I’ve gone back/forth with A2 Hosting and WordPress Forums for months and no one seems to know why LiteSpeed is now defective.

Here’s my latest email from A2Hosting’s customer support. Can someone on this forum please tell me how I get LiteSpeed to begin (again) turning jpg images in my media folder into webp images. And YES, I have the settings correctly configured, so it’s not that. And LiteSpeed worked fine for me up until a few months ago, when it arbitrarily stopped converting jpg images into webp’s.

Here’s A2’s latest email to me. (Thanks for your help in advance!)

Here's my latest email from A2 Hosting support. Can someone please offer advice as to how I can get LiteSpeed to turn jpg's into webp's? Or should I just abandon LiteSpeed and go back to Autoptimize and WP Optimize? I never had problems with those two plugins.

Here's the latest email from A2 Support:


Hello Chris,

Thank you for your patience and support while I worked on this further. I apologize for any and all inconveniences caused to you regarding the webp images concern and I totally understand how difficult it would be if things are not working as expected. Not to worry, I will be more than happy to assist you further with this.

I was able to replicate this issue you are facing and yes, you are absolutely right about the recent images not showing up in the media library when you try to select an image for any of your posts/pages/products.

I created a new page called "A2 Test" with the URL:?https://christopherbabson.com/a2-test/?and tried adding an image by clicking on the "Insert Media" button. When I reviewed the image files uploaded for June and May months, I can only see jpg versions. If I filter the results for March and before months, I can definitely see the webp versions showing up. This is definitely a rare scenario which we have observed as webp images are showing perfectly fine for previous months from April and before.

I double checked to make sure if webp versions were created on the server side and they were. If you access "public_html/wp-content/uploads/2024/06" folder and view the images, you can see that webp images are getting generated by Litespeed plugin and are being saved. They are just not getting updated/visible in the media section when we try to insert an image to a page/post. I have attached a screenshot for your reference. Please review the same.

I had taken a full backup of your cPanel before making any changes. So I installed a plugin called "Media Sync" to detect images in the file manager and link them to the database. However, that didn't bring any fruitful results unfortunately. So I reverted the changes by restoring the database from the backup I had taken earlier. If you wish to view the backup file and the extracted folder, they are available in your cPanel's home directory. Backup file name is "backup-6.20.2024_06-52-04_chris117.tar.gz" and the extracted folder is "backup before troubleshooting". These are located outside public_html directory.

As far as I can see, when you select an image from media library, you will see the image name as image.jpg/image.png but when the website/page/post is loaded, the actual images being served are the webp versions. If you observe the browser console logs which I got by selecting the image, right clicking on that and selecting "inspect element", I can see that the "fetch priority" for that particular image is actually given more preference and the webp images are being fetched instead of the normal jpg or png versions.

So based on this, what I can observe is, Litespeed probably made some changes to their plugin/configuration to display the names in the original format but show/fetch the images in webp format when the site is loaded. Unfortunately even after researching a lot about this, I could not see any posts/blogs regarding this change. This might have been done internally and this is my best guess.

You can verify this with Litespeed support by clicking on the "Toolbox" section in Litespeed plugin settings > Click on Report > Send Report button. The current details of the Litespeed settings and configurations will be sent to Litespeed Support and you will get a report number. Please note down that number and create a forum support post here:?https://www.ads-software.com/support/plugin/litespeed-cache/

Someone from Litespeed support should be able to verify this. If they say that webp versions should be displayed in the media section, then it is possible that there is an issue with the current plugin settings and we could destroy all optimization data ( This will delete all webp versions from the beginning when you started using Litespeed for Image Optimization) and then we can perform another Optimization. However, please note that there is a significant risk in doing so. If Litespeed did change the way they display images, then your earlier webp versions may also become unavailable/hidden.

The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]