November 18, 2021

WebP and AVIF support is here

Starting today, PixServe automatically detects browser support via the Accept header and serves images in WebP or AVIF format when possible. No action is needed on your part — if you've embedded a PixServe image on your site, visitors with modern browsers will automatically receive the optimized version.

The numbers speak for themselves: on average, WebP produces files 35% smaller than equivalent-quality JPEG, and AVIF pushes that to around 50%. For a free image host that serves billions of requests per month, those savings add up fast — both for our bandwidth bill and for your visitors' loading times.

Your original files are always preserved. We generate optimized variants at the edge using Cloudflare's image processing pipeline, so the conversion happens on-the-fly with aggressive caching. If a browser doesn't support modern formats (or if the conversion would actually increase file size, which happens occasionally with very small images), we serve the original. There's no downside.