New WebP Image Conversion Service – Announcement and Info

W3 Total Cache is happy to introduce a new feature to help you get the best performance possible from your website, the WebP image conversion service.

How does it work?
This feature is available for free to all W3TC users in the Performance > Extensions menu. Select Image Service > Activate to enable the feature.

Using the Media Library – List View menu, select individual images or use bulk select, and click Convert to send to our Image Conversion API. You can also enable automatic conversions and configure the service in the Performance > Extensions > Image Service > Settings menu.

Important Troubleshooting Information.

Free users are restricted to 1000 API requests per hour and 100000 requests per month. Free conversions are also performed at a lower priority in the API queue than conversions for W3TC Pro Users.

Why are my conversions taking so long?
We released this feature on Monday, Nov. 2 and the demand on the API servers has been huge. We’re excited that so many of you are utilizing the new feature! Because of the high demand and backlog, some of you may have very long wait times for your conversions. We’re working as quickly as possible to optimize the API response time and add additional resources to the service.

Why are my Server Resources Spiking?
While the actual image conversion is performed on a remote server, the new feature relies on WordPress 5.8’s new WebP support to perform the conversions to your theme’s specified image sizes (i.e. Large, Medium, Thumbnail). If you are performing a bulk conversion, keep in mind that your own server’s resources (i.e. Disk I/O, memory, and CPU usage) are used to make the various image sizes.

If this is affecting your site’s performance, consider converting smaller batches of images at a time.

Updates are coming
New updates and enhancements are coming in the next weeks to improve the performance of the Image Conversion service. If you’re having trouble using it right now, consider deactivating the extension for now until we can release the updates.