WebP vs JPG: Should You Switch Your Website Images?

If your website still serves JPG images, you are shipping roughly a third more data than you need to. WebP has been supported by every major browser for years now, and the switch is one of the few performance improvements that requires no code at all.

That said, it is not the right answer everywhere. Here is the honest picture.

What WebP actually is

Google released WebP in 2010 as a replacement for both JPG and PNG. It does lossy compression like JPG, lossless compression like PNG, and supports transparency and animation as well.

It took a long time to become universally usable — Safari held out until 2020 — but that argument is over. Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari all support it, on desktop and mobile.

The size difference

Against JPG at matching visual quality, expect 25 to 35 per cent smaller files. Against PNG, often 60 to 80 per cent smaller, because PNG was never designed for photographs.

A representative 1920 × 1080 photograph:

All three are visually identical on screen. On a page with twenty images, that gap is around three megabytes — several seconds on a mobile connection.

WebP also replaces PNG

This part gets overlooked. WebP supports a full alpha channel, so it handles transparency exactly as PNG does. A transparent logo converted to WebP keeps its transparency and comes out dramatically smaller.

For a site with lots of transparent graphics, this is often a bigger win than the photo savings.

When not to use it

Being clear about the limits matters more than cheerleading.

Anything going to print. WebP is a web format. Print shops want PDF, TIFF or high-quality JPG. Keep a proper master file.

Email attachments. Some clients still handle WebP poorly. Send JPG.

Files other people will edit. Support in older desktop software is patchy. If a colleague needs to open it in a five-year-old design tool, do not hand them WebP.

Marketplace and platform uploads. Etsy, Amazon, eBay and most social platforms specify JPG or PNG. Follow their rules rather than guessing.

Anything with legal or archival weight. Store archives in a format that will still be trivially readable in twenty years.

What about AVIF?

AVIF compresses harder still — often another 20 per cent beyond WebP — and browser support is now broad. So why not skip straight to it?

Encoding is considerably slower, tooling is less mature, and the extra saving on top of WebP is smaller than the saving WebP already gave you over JPG. In 2026, WebP is the pragmatic default. AVIF is worth the effort on large, image-heavy sites where you can automate conversion and the marginal bytes genuinely pay for themselves.

Making the switch

Do the two steps in this order, because the first matters more:

1. Resize before you convert. A 4000-pixel image displayed in an 800-pixel column wastes most of its data regardless of format. Cap widths sensibly first with Resize Image — 1920px for hero images, 1200px for content images.

2. Convert to WebP. Run the batch through Image to WebP. Quality 82 per cent is a good default; it looks like a 90 per cent JPG at around half the size.

Then upload the WebP files and update your image references. Keep your originals somewhere safe — you cannot recover quality later from a compressed file.

Do you need a fallback?

Not for browser support in 2026 — that is a solved problem. The `<picture>` element with a JPG fallback is still worth using if a meaningful share of your audience is on genuinely old devices, or if your images get scraped by tools you do not control. For most sites, serving WebP directly is fine.

Convert without installing anything

You can convert a whole folder at once here, in your browser:

• Image to WebP — batch conversion with a quality slider
• Image to JPG — for when you need to go the other way
• Compress Image — resize and convert in a single pass

Nothing is uploaded, so there is no queue and no waiting. It is free for life with no sign-up and no daily limit — convert your entire media library in one sitting if you want to, without an account, a watermark or a paywall.