Google’s made a big move for website owners and SEO folks. They’re now letting AVIF images show up in Google Search and Google Images. This goes for all platforms that use Google Search data too.
AVIF is a new image format that’s set to change the game. It makes image files much smaller, which is great news for your website’s speed. This means your Core Web Vitals scores could get a nice boost, especially the Largest Contentful Paint score.
How AVIF Can Improve SEO
To start doing SEO right, you need search engines to find and list your pages. Using smaller files and making your web pages show up faster helps search crawlers see what’s on your site more quickly. This means they can look at more of your pages in less time.
Google has some tips about how much time they spend looking at your site. They say if you make your pages load and appear faster, you’re less likely to get messages saying they’ve spent too much time on your site.
When your pages load faster, Google’s search bot can check out more of your content. This could mean more of your pages show up in search results, which is good for your site.
It also says that faster loading times enable Googlebot to crawl more pages. This means more of your content can be indexed and potentially show up in search results.
Improve your site’s crawl efficiency.
Increase your page loading speed.
Google’s crawling is limited by bandwidth, time, and availability of Googlebot instances. We could be able to crawl more pages on your website if your server answers to queries more quickly.
What Is AVIF?
AVIF (AV1 Image File Format) is a new type of image format that’s shaking things up. It takes the best parts of JPEG, PNG, and GIF and squeezes them into a smaller package. We’re talking about files that are 50% smaller than JPEGs!
AVIF can do all sorts of cool things:
- It supports transparency like PNG.
- It handles photos like JPEG.
- It offers better colors and deeper blacks.
- It can even do animations like GIF.
AVIF Vs. WebP
When it comes to everyday web use, AVIF is usually the better choice. It creates smaller files and keeps images looking good. WebP is still handy when you need lossless images – that’s when you want to keep every detail, no matter how big the file gets.
Is AVIF supported?
AVIF is catching on fast. Most major browsers like Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Safari are on board. Some popular content management systems like WordPress and Joomla support it too. Even Cloudflare, a big CDN provider, is ready for AVIF.
Right now, only about 0.2% of websites use AVIF. But that’s likely to change quickly now that Google Search is showing AVIF images. It could become the go-to image format because it helps websites run much smoother than they do with JPEG and PNG.
Social Media and AVIF
Not all social media platforms are AVIF-friendly yet. As of July 2024:
- Facebook, Pinterest, Threads, and WhatsApp support AVIF.
- LinkedIn, Mastodon, Slack, and Twitter/X don’t support it yet.
AVIF Images Are Automatically Indexable By Google
The good news is that Google can index AVIF images right out of the box. You don’t need to do anything special to make them show up in search results.
AVIF Images Are Automatically Indexable By Google
Good news for website owners! Google has made it super easy to use AVIF images on your site. According to their announcement, you don’t need to jump through any hoops to get these images indexed.
This means you can start using AVIF images right away without worrying about extra steps. Google’s search engine will pick them up just like it does with other image formats. It’s a hassle-free way to improve your site’s performance and potentially boost your SEO.
So, if you’re thinking about switching to AVIF, you can go ahead without fear of losing visibility in search results. It’s a simple change that could make a big difference in how fast your site loads and how it ranks in search engines.
“Over the recent years, AVIF has become one of the most commonly used image formats on the web. We’re happy to announce that AVIF is now a supported file type in Google Search, for Google Images as well as any place that uses images in Google Search. You don’t need to do anything special to have your AVIF files indexed by Google.”
