A couple of days ago while racing my bicycle and not really thinking much, the next idea for Autoptimize just came to move; add a field to the metabox to allow an image to be specified as “to be preloaded” to help with Largest Contentful Paint.
Well, this has now been committed to the beta-version in 3 guises; when image optimization or image lazyload is active, AO will look for the full tag and use that to create a responsive preload tag. If the preload does not match an
tag or if those 2 optimizations are not active, AO will add a non-responsive preload.
But enough writing, why don’t you go off to download the Beta now and play with it yourself already? All feedback is welcome!

What about images of different formats inserted by tag?
I have jpg and avif on my site, but in the past I had also webp. What then? 🙂
I meant (picture) tag, but html was removed the comment 🙂
In the current version of the code, AO (when image opt. or lazyload are active, if not see below) looks for an
https://web.dev/preload-responsive-images/). As far as I know there is no existing logic to do something similar for
If image opt or lazyload are not active, AO will take the URL provided and will make a non-reponsive version of that.