Handling WebP Images – Developer Guide

Why We Use WebP for Property Images

Our API delivers property images in WebP format by default for the following reasons:

Smaller file sizes (25–35% smaller than JPG/PNG at similar quality)
Faster page load speeds — critical for SEO and mobile UX
Better Core Web Vitals — improving your Google search ranking
Modern features — supports transparency, animation, lossy & lossless compression

SEO & Performance Benefit

Using WebP can significantly enhance your page load speeds and improve SEO rankings. Google recommends WebP to help meet Core Web Vitals thresholds for modern web experiences.

🔍 If your frontend or CDN cannot support WebP, we advise handling conversion client-side during ingestion.

🔄 Converting WebP to JPG During Ingestion

If using WebP is not an option for you, they can be converted back to JPG/PNG at the time of ingestion. Here’s a sample script in Python:

import requests
from PIL import Image
from io import BytesIO
import os

def download_and_convert(image_url, output_dir):
    response = requests.get(image_url)
    image = Image.open(BytesIO(response.content)).convert("RGB")

    filename = os.path.basename(image_url).replace('.webp', '.jpg')
    output_path = os.path.join(output_dir, filename)

    image.save(output_path, 'JPEG', quality=85)

# Example
download_and_convert("https://your-api.com/images/sample.webp", "./local-images")