I am thrilled that Webflow now supports webp image formats but am struggling with how to take advantage of this capability with the CMS. As I am transitioning our website from a different platform, at least initially, we will want to do a one time sync of our data from Airtable to the Webflow CMS for images as we have ~1,000 collection items. These would have to come over as .jpg files.
As I understand it, if we were to upload images to the asset panel we can easily compress to webp format. But, if we sync the images to the CMS we can’t compress those images. Is this correct? Are there any clever work arounds? It’s simply not feasible to individually upload 1,000 images to the asset panel, compress, and manually add to each CMS item.
I have the feeling that there are multiple answers to your challenge. Especially as it’s a one-time operation.
What I would try to do is export data from Airtable to CSV. What is important here is to properly get the filename of the images in the images field. Their address and extension are less important.
Then try to get all the images and download them locally to optimize them. Using an optimization app, converting them to webp.
From there I’d try to get them all in one folder on any server.
The rest consists to edit the images columns in the CSV, replacing the address by the address of the folder on the server, and the extension by .webp
Why wouldn’t this work?
Edit: in all logic, it’s just a matter of time for Webflow to come up with its own program to batch optimize CMS images on existing sites. It’s not so much because it would save them bandwidth, I heard the gain is trivial. It’s more because this sounds important to their clients (us) as tools like Google page speed constantly push us to optimize everything if we want good grades. So, just a matter of time, I don’t know when, but I don’t think it’s going to take months and months.
And if Webflow doesn’t do it, others will do, as others already propose cheap apps to batch optimize CMS images on existing sites.