Originally Posted by zijlstravideo

Well, not just SEO, since the file size is smaller, it will load faster which is a better user experience. 10 jpg images of 100kb each or 10 webp images of 55kb each, makes quite the difference in load time.

Serving large, non-optimized images is kind of a no go in 2022. You want to serve smaller images for mobile users compared to desktop sized images, use webp (with fallback if there's no browser support), lazyload the images below the fold.

These are somewhat the bare minimum things to do. You want your pages to load really fast these days, just optimizing images isn't even enough.

I would go much further and look at cache-ing a static, minified version of the recipe pages, cutting out all sql requests and php execution all together. But also using a PHP handler which supports Opcache (in-memory cache) etc.