What Is WEBP and Why Do So Many Websites Use It?
What the WEBP image format is, how it compares to JPG and PNG, and why it's become the default format for modern websites.
If you’ve right-clicked an image on a website recently and noticed it saves as a .webp file instead of .jpg or .png, that’s WEBP — a format Google introduced in 2010 specifically to solve a problem JPG and PNG were never designed for: making the web load faster.
What makes it different
WEBP uses a more modern compression algorithm than either JPG or PNG, which lets it do something neither could do alone: at the same visual quality, a WEBP file is typically 25-35% smaller than the equivalent JPG, and it supports both a full transparency channel (like PNG) and simple animation (like GIF) in one format. Previously, a website needing a transparent logo had to use PNG (large files) and a website needing small photo file sizes had to use JPG (no transparency) — WEBP does both.
Why this matters for websites specifically
Page load speed is a direct, measurable factor in both user experience and search ranking — Google’s Core Web Vitals explicitly measure how quickly a page’s main content becomes visible, and images are very often the largest thing a page has to download. Cutting image weight by a quarter to a third, across every image on a page, is one of the most reliable ways to improve those scores without redesigning anything. That’s why WEBP adoption has been driven heavily by web developers and site owners rather than by end users choosing it directly.
Where it falls short
WEBP’s main limitation is compatibility with software from before roughly 2020 — some older image editors, some legacy content-management systems, and a handful of older apps still don’t recognize a .webp file. Every current browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari 14+, Edge) supports it fully, so this mostly matters for downstream tools, not for visitors viewing a website. If you’ve downloaded a WEBP image and need to open it in older software, converting it to PNG or JPG instantly restores full compatibility.
Animated WEBP exists but is far less common than the static (photo/graphic) use case — this tool converts only the first frame of an animated WEBP to a static image, matching how most people actually encounter the format.
Should you convert your images to WEBP?
If you run a website or blog and your images are currently JPG or PNG, converting them to WEBP is close to a free performance win — smaller files, same visual quality, full support in every current browser. If you’re just viewing or sharing a photo casually, the difference is small enough that it rarely matters which format you use. See our full format comparison for how WEBP stacks up against every other format this tool supports.