HEIC on your website: WordPress, Shopify, Wix

Can a browser display HEIC in an img tag?

Only Safari can. Can I use's HEIF/HEIC data (opens in a new tab) marks Safari 17.0 and later, on macOS and iOS, as supported; Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, Samsung Internet and Chrome for Android are all marked as not supported. Its note on the format is blunt: it is "hard for browsers to support HEIC because it is complex and expensive to license". Our browser support guide goes into the detail.

What should I serve instead of HEIC?

A JPEG, WebP or AVIF. MDN's image format guide (opens in a new tab) lists APNG, AVIF, GIF, JPEG, JPEG XL, PNG, SVG and WebP as the common web types and does not list HEIC. It says "for raster images, prefer WebP or AVIF", that AVIF needs fallbacks to formats with better support, and that JPEG "is often a good fallback format for photographs". Our comparison of HEIC, AVIF, WebP and JPEG XL has the sizes and trade-offs.

To prepare your own photos before uploading, HEIC to WebP, HEIC to AVIF and HEIC to JPG run in your browser and upload nothing. If a form caps the size in KB, use HEIC to Target Size.

The picture element pattern

The <picture> element lets the browser pick. MDN says a <source> whose type the browser does not support "is skipped", and that the <img> is the fallback and carries the alt text and size. List the best format first:

A <source type="image/heic"> would be taken by Safari 17 and later and skipped by everyone else, but it buys nothing: in our test of 25 photos AVIF landed at 80% of a JPEG's bytes at quality 85 and HEIC at 82%, and Safari already reads AVIF.

Does WordPress support HEIC?

Yes, with conditions that depend on the WordPress version. The newest release on wordpress.org's news feed (opens in a new tab) is 7.1.3 (6 October 2026).

The 6.7 dev note (opens in a new tab) says HEIC uploads are converted "on the server when possible" so that you can use them "regardless of whether a visitor's browser supports HEIC". To switch it off, remove the HEIC entry in the image_editor_output_format filter, as the note shows.

WordPress 7.1 adds a second path. The 7.1 dev note (opens in a new tab) says HEIC images "can be decoded in the browser and converted to JPEG before upload, even on hosts without server-side HEIC support", that the decode "relies on platform codecs", and that the original HEIC is kept as a companion file and removed when the attachment is deleted. The 7.1 announcement (opens in a new tab) lists "native support for AVIF, HEIC, and HDR gain maps". Client-side processing can be turned off with the wp_client_side_media_processing_enabled filter.

Converted JPEGs can be large. Commenters on the 6.7 note reported files nearly double the HEIC's size; the 7.1 note says big_image_size_threshold sets the dimension above which WordPress scales an image down, so that is the filter to tune.

Why does WordPress still say HEIC is not supported?

Usually because the host's image library cannot read it. WordPress's server-side converter is Imagick, not GD. In the core source (the development branch, 7.2-alpha, read 12 October 2026) the GD editor accepts only JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP and AVIF, while the Imagick editor asks Imagick::queryFormats whether HEIC is available. PHP's GD constants (imagetypes (opens in a new tab)) have no HEIC entry either.

1. 01

   Update WordPress

   The browser path needs 7.1 or later; the server path needs 6.7 or later.

2. 02

   Check what the server can read

   Open Tools > Site Health > Info > Media Handling and look for HEIC under ImageMagick supported file formats, as the dev note says.

3. 03

   If HEIC is missing, ask the host

   ImageMagick's format table (opens in a new tab) lists HEIC as read and write and says it "requires the libheif delegate library", so the host needs an ImageMagick built with libheif. A strict policy.xml can also block it: ImageMagick's recommended web policy (opens in a new tab) permits only GIF, JPEG, PNG and WEBP.

4. 04

   Or convert before you upload

   Convert on your computer with HEIC to JPG or the batch converter. That works on any host.

Which WordPress plugin converts HEIC to JPG?

Since 6.7 you may not need one. A plugin earns its place if you want WebP or AVIF copies, or your host cannot read HEIC. These three are listed on wordpress.org; we describe them from their listings and have not installed or tested them.

Does Shopify, Squarespace or Wix accept HEIC?

So on Shopify, Wix and WordPress.com you can upload a HEIC, but only WordPress documents what happens to it. Convert to JPG yourself if you need to know exactly what visitors get; on Squarespace you have to. The page does not say what happens to a HEIC dragged into the browser editor.

How do I serve a HEIC file with the right Content-Type?

As image/heic. IANA (opens in a new tab) registers two subtypes: heic for files with the heic, heix, heim or heis brand (HEVC-coded images, what an iPhone writes) and heif for files with the mif1 brand. The extensions are .heic and .hif for heic, .heif and .hif for heif. A HEIC served inline still will not show in Chrome, Edge or Firefox, so use it for downloads.

• Apache: mime.types (opens in a new tab) in the httpd repository maps image/heic to heic (and heics, heif and heifs for the others).
• nginx: mime.types (opens in a new tab) in nginx's repository has image/avif and image/webp but no heic or heif line. Without a mapping nginx uses default_type (opens in a new tab), application/octet-stream in the sample nginx.conf. Add image/heic heic; yourself if you host HEIC. A distribution may ship a different file.
• Other hosts and CDNs: not documented in the sources we read; check what header your host sends.

How do I convert HEIC on the server?

Briefly, because the developer guide covers it. ImageMagick reads HEIC through libheif, as above, and WordPress uses that path. The risk is real: HEIC decoding handles untrusted files on your server, and libheif and its HEVC decoder have a history of memory-safety bugs, so keep them patched. Can a HEIC file contain a virus? sets out the details. If you do not need server-side conversion, convert on the uploader's device or let WordPress 7.1 do it in their browser.

What the platforms do not document

• WordPress.com, Shopify and Wix: what format a HEIC becomes for visitors. Wix says images become AVIF and Shopify says it serves the best format for the browser, both without naming HEIC.
• WordPress 7.1: whether the browser HEIC path runs in the Media Library upload page and under the same conditions as the WebAssembly pipeline.
• Squarespace: what happens to a HEIC dragged into the editor in a browser. The page says only that supported types are jpg, gif, png and webp.
• All of them: whether a HEIC upload keeps its original after conversion, except WordPress, which says it does.