@ChristineCooper I've had very good experience with wordpress.org/plugins/webp-express - which in addition to convert to webp will also be able to load them dynamically depending on if the browser supports it or not
Not sure if this is still accurate, but PHP's image handling methods used to be extremely bad, so if possible try to avoid imagick or GD for conversion, instead I'd go for something like cwebp.
And beware that a properly optimized JPEG may even be smaller than webp. So after conversion you should check if it makes sense.
As for the original question: I've had extremely good results with webp (& avif). One example would be a very image heavy client site, where single request payload went from ~2.5 MB to ~1MB (just images)
Well I mean if we store them in separate rows, then we plan to use all sorts of joins and searches on them. Otherwise a JSON type could hold all the data as a document and you could still perform basic stuff on it since MySQL now natively supports JSON
Also I was thinking about a NoSQL database for products that have no particular structure, and a relational database for other purposes such as users, store orders, etc that have a predefined structure
Many modern frameworks support connecting to multiple db server at the same time, some even can do INNER JOIN between 2 different servers
Right now I'm doing as I mentioned earlier, storing each variant as a record and indexing their IDs while cross referencing them as Foreign Key. I'm just wondering if I might have missed something?
Querying indexed integers shouldn't be that expensive IMO
What would your preferred method be for building DB structure of an ecommerce? considering you can choose anything
@JackJohansson just think it through in your head what an inner join across multiple servers might actually involve if it's the framework itself doing it
and I would struggle to call WP's use of the database as relational
