What Is WebP, and Should You Use It?
WebP makes images roughly 25-35% smaller than JPEG with the same quality. Here's what it is, how it works, and when to use it (and when not to).
If you have ever right-clicked an image online and noticed it saved as a .webpfile instead of the familiar .jpg or .png, you have already met one of the web’s most widely used image formats. WebP is everywhere in 2026, yet a lot of people are still unsure what it is, why it exists, and whether they should be using it for their own images. This guide answers all three.
What is WebP?
WebP is an image format created by Google and first released in 2010. It was designed for one job: to make photos and graphics on the web as small as possible without an obvious drop in quality. The format grew out of the same engineering work behind the VP8 video codec, which is why it borrows clever compression techniques normally found in video.
The headline benefit is size. According to Google’s own developer documentation, lossy WebP images are typically 25–35% smaller than comparable JPEGs at equivalent visual quality, and lossless WebP is meaningfully smaller than PNG. On a busy page with a dozen photos, that difference adds up to faster loads, lower bandwidth bills, and better Core Web Vitals scores.
What makes WebP special
Most older formats do one thing. JPEG is lossy, PNG is lossless, GIF does animation. WebP is unusual because it rolls all of these capabilities into a single format:
- Lossy compression— like JPEG, it discards detail your eye is unlikely to miss, producing tiny files ideal for photographs.
- Lossless compression— like PNG, it can preserve every pixel exactly, which is perfect for logos, screenshots, and line art.
- Alpha transparency— it supports transparent backgrounds in both lossy and lossless modes, something JPEG cannot do at all and PNG only does losslessly.
- Animation— it can replace bulky animated GIFs with far smaller, full-color, smoother clips.
That combination is the real appeal. One format can cover almost every job you previously needed JPEG, PNG, and GIF for — usually at a smaller size than any of them.
Is browser support good enough in 2026?
Yes. This used to be the main reason to hesitate, but that ship has sailed. Every major browser — Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, and their mobile versions — has supported WebP for years. As the MDN documentation on WebP confirms, support is now effectively universal across the modern web. Safari was the last holdout, adding it back in 2020, so any browser a person is realistically using today will display WebP without trouble.
For websites, the safe pattern is to serve WebP with the <picture>element and a JPEG or PNG fallback — but in practice the fallback is rarely triggered anymore.
When you should use WebP
WebP is a strong default for almost anything bound for the web:
- Photos on websites and blogs, where the size savings over JPEG directly speed up your pages.
- Graphics with transparency, where lossy WebP can be a fraction of the size of an equivalent transparent PNG.
- Product images, thumbnails, and hero banners— anywhere bandwidth and load time matter.
- Short animations that would otherwise be heavy animated GIFs.
When to stick with something else
WebP is excellent, but it is not the answer for every situation. A few cases where another format makes more sense:
- Print and archival masters. Keep a high-quality original (often a JPEG, TIFF, or PNG) as your master and export WebP copies for the web, not the other way around.
- Sharing with non-technical recipients or older software. Some desktop apps, email clients, and operating-system previews still handle WebP awkwardly. A plain JPEG is more foolproof for an email attachment.
- When an even smaller format fits. For maximum compression, AVIF can beat WebP on file size, though it is slower to encode. WebP remains the more broadly compatible, faster-to-create choice.
How to convert your images to WebP
Converting is simple, and you do not need to install anything or upload your files to a server. With FileShrinking’s WebP compressor, you drop in a JPEG or PNG and it produces an optimized WebP entirely in your browser — your images never leave your device. If you already have WebP files and need to go the other way, or you want to move between several formats, the image converter handles that too.
A practical workflow: keep your original photo, run it through the converter to create a WebP for the web, and compare. If you are still deciding between formats, it is worth compressing the same image as a JPEG and putting the two side by side. Because every tool here runs locally, you can experiment with different quality settings as much as you like at no privacy cost.
The short answer to the title: for almost any image headed to a website, yes, you should use WebP. It gives you JPEG-beating compression, PNG-style transparency, and GIF-replacing animation in one well-supported package — and converting takes only a few seconds.