Google has a history of guiding as well as misguiding novice webmasters and Bloggers with conflicting pieces of advice. One such piece of advice amongst a long list of advice has been them saying to use modern image formats like AVIF/WebP on webpages in order to reduce their size/bloat.
While using modern images does make sense from a bandwidth as well as speed perspective. It’s very easy to state that if a webpage is maybe 2 megabytes in size then in the majority of cases most of its size comes from the images being loaded. And in such a case reducing the size of images without effectively compromising on quality is something that can help.
The highest quality on the lowest file size is something that can be done with AVIF images.
We wrote a separate massive article on the benefits and bandwidth comparison of using AVIF images, which you can read here.
But despite all that we have stopped using AVIF images in our newer posts now. You might ask why so? Simply put, contrary to their advice Google still does not index AVIF images despite actually backing this open-source image format.
So if you change all your images to AVIF in order to save your bandwidth then technically none of them would show up in Google search and all of your traffic coming in from Google Image search would vanish overnight.
Such was the case with one webmaster as can be seen in this convo on Google Support Forums:
So it might seem like all hope is lost if you really wanted to stick with AVIF and upload those images on your website.
Another hiccup that anyone might encounter is that the AVIF mime type isn’t supported yet officially in WordPress. To do that a person needs to use the “Mime Types Plus” plugin and then add AVIF and AVIFS (AVIF sequence) as custom mime types in order to fully support these images.
A user on the same forum stated above had a definitive answer which will require some code magic. 
Using dynamic serving to serve AVIF format to supported browsers and falling back to Webp/JPG for older browsers and the Googlebot might be the best approach.
Right now we are avoiding all these hassles and optimizing all our images to WebP format but AVIF levels of compression are nowhere to be seen.
Let’s hope Google fixes this situation soon in the upcoming days as they themselves are one of the core developers behind this format and this format definitely feels like the future of a more open web!
Do let us know your thoughts on the same in the comments below!
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