How to activate WebP/AVIF automatically on WooCommerce

Once the plugin is activated and the “Automatic Replacement” option is checked in the settings, ImagePipe automatically rewrites the relevant tags to with automatic fallback: AVIF for browsers that support it, WebP otherwise, and JPEG or PNG as a last resort for older browsers. No manual re-export of the catalog is necessary,the first visit to a product page triggers the generation of the missing variant, which is then permanently cached on disk for all subsequent visits, including those by other visitors.

In a WooCommerce store, this goes beyond just the product page: category grids and listings, the product page gallery (main image and thumbnail strip in the zoom popup), as well as the cart and checkout blocks, are all automatically replaced in the same way, without having to enable them one by one. The site logo and images inserted into the content editor (posts, pages) follow the same logic, outside of the WooCommerce context.

One intentional exception is WooCommerce order emails: images in these emails always remain as standard PNGs within a simple `` tag, never as WebP/AVIF or ``. The rendering of these formats remains too inconsistent across email clients to take the risk,some silently re-encode the images upon receipt, while others do not display them at all. There’s nothing for you to configure: this behavior is automatic as soon as ImagePipe detects that it’s an email being sent, rather than a simple display of the order in the admin panel.

In any case, the original files in your media library are never modified or replaced: ImagePipe only modifies the tags displayed on the site, linking to a generated and cached version. You can therefore disable automatic replacement at any time without losing any images or having to reimport your catalog.