Why is Shopify recompressing my JPEG into a larger WEBP format?

Technical Q&A
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When using Chrome’s DevTools to analyze my page load, I noticed that Shopify is recompressing some JPEGS into much larger file sizes and delivering them in the WEBP format.

For example, one product image was compressed and uploaded to Shopify as a 225 KB jpeg.

When loading an image of that product on my homepage, Shopify automatically creates a 378 KB webp version of that image and uses that instead.

That is a huge file size difference and directly impacts my page’s load time.

Any advice or insight would be greatly appreciated. How can this be fixed?

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As a test, I tried compressing a WEBP version of my product image and using that instead in Shopify. Although the uploaded webp image was compressed to 215 KB, the image shopify creates and loads is still much larger (368 KB). The image name also has “680x” after it, so its also a smaller image size than the 2048x2048 I uploaded and compressed.

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Would be nice to see someone from Shopify replying to this…