What Is WebP and Should You Use It?

WebP is an image format Google released in 2010 to replace JPEG, PNG, and GIF on the web. It is supported in every modern browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge) and produces noticeably smaller files than the formats it replaces — typically 25–35% smaller than JPEG at the same perceptual quality, and 50%+ smaller than PNG for graphics with transparency.

If you care about page load time and bandwidth costs, WebP is almost always the right format to serve from your website.

How WebP saves space

WebP supports two compression modes:

• Lossy compression (like JPEG) for photographs. It uses VP8 video-style block prediction, which is more sophisticated than JPEG's discrete-cosine-transform approach and produces fewer compression artifacts at the same file size.
• Lossless compression (like PNG) for graphics, screenshots, and images with sharp edges. It uses backward-reference prediction and arithmetic coding.

WebP also supports transparency (alpha channel) in both modes, animation, and metadata — so it's a drop-in replacement for JPEG, PNG, and GIF.

When to use WebP

• Photographs on the web. Lossy WebP at quality 80–85 is visually indistinguishable from JPEG at quality 90 but ships at roughly 70% of the file size.
• Graphics with transparency (logos, screenshots with shadows, illustrations). Lossless WebP beats PNG dramatically — a 1 MB PNG often becomes a 200–400 KB WebP.
• Hero images and above-the-fold content. Smaller files = faster Largest Contentful Paint, which is part of Core Web Vitals.

When NOT to use WebP

• You're sending the image to a printer or to a designer who uses Photoshop. Adobe's WebP support is recent and uneven; TIFF or high-quality JPEG is safer for production handoffs.
• You need lossless quality and the file will be re-encoded later. Each lossy re-encode loses data; if your workflow involves multiple edits, keep the working file as PNG or TIFF and only convert to WebP at the end.
• Your audience uses very old browsers. WebP is supported by 97%+ of global browsers as of 2026, but if you target enterprise customers stuck on IE11, fall back to JPEG.

How to convert

You don't need Photoshop or an online uploader for this. Dropvert converts to and from WebP entirely in your browser — the file never leaves your device.

• Convert JPEG to WebP
• Convert PNG to WebP
• Convert WebP back to JPEG
• Convert WebP to PNG

If you have a stack of files, use Compress Image — it handles WebP and gives you a single quality slider that previews the trade-off in real time.

FAQ

Does WebP work in email? Outlook desktop renders WebP since 2021; Gmail and Apple Mail render it. Older Outlook versions (pre-2021) show a broken-image placeholder, so for marketing emails JPEG is still the safer default.

Is there a quality difference between WebP and AVIF? AVIF compresses tighter than WebP — typically another 20% smaller — but encoding is slower and Safari support is more recent. WebP is the safer all-purpose choice; AVIF is the right choice when you want maximum compression and your audience runs current browsers.

Will WebP photos lose color accuracy? Lossy WebP uses 4:2:0 chroma subsampling by default, same as JPEG, so the color trade-off is comparable. For color-critical work (product photography, art reproduction), use lossless WebP or stick with TIFF.