What if I uninstall?

WebP images will be NOT removed on uninstall.

.htaccess rule will be removed, so if you want to load WebP without this plugin you need to backup this rule, or write your own.

Thank you. Can I assume then if I removed the .htaccess rules that the site would go back to serving the original jpg/png images? My concern is that I’ve used plugins in the past for various added functions and then had to remove them for one reason or another, and was left with all sorts of broken things. I do appreciate your work, and your time responding.

Yes it will work then like before with original JPG and PNG. But be careful, there is one option that can remove original images, but there is a big red notice, so you will understand, just read it ??

One last question. I notice that WP now has core support for webp upload and display in posts. Why couldn’t this plugin be used to convert images to webp and then let WP process them like any other image, i.e. without the .htaccess code?

Because then you will need to do some crazy database replacements for existing images and they can be on many different places in database in many different formats… Absolute, relative paths, urls, sometimes inside serialized data, sometimes escaped backslashes, etc…

There can be also generated CSS files from some plugins containing original images urls so you will need to regenerate everything…

It can work for a new website that you just start creating, but it is impossible to make it works for some older big website with millions of possible plugins, database tables, etc…