What Is WEBP and Should You Be Using It for Your Website?

WEBP has been around since 2010, but it only became a practical default for web development around 2020 when Safari added support — making it compatible with all major browsers. If you're still defaulting to JPG and PNG for everything on your website, switching to WEBP is one of the easiest performance improvements you can make.

What is WEBP?

WEBP is an image format developed by Google. It was designed specifically for the web, with a single goal: smaller files at equivalent visual quality compared to JPG and PNG.

WEBP supports both lossy and lossless compression, and it supports transparency (like PNG) in both modes. This makes it a viable replacement for JPG, PNG, and in many cases both.

How much smaller are WEBP files?

Compared to JPG at equivalent visual quality: 25–35% smaller.

Compared to lossless PNG: up to 26% smaller.

In practice, converting a website's images from JPG to WEBP can reduce total image weight by 30% or more — which translates directly to faster page loads.

WEBP vs JPG

For photographs, WEBP at quality 80 typically produces files 25–35% smaller than JPG at quality 85, with comparable or slightly better visual quality. The compression algorithm is simply more efficient.

JPG has broader compatibility — it opens in every image viewer, email client, and application without issue. WEBP is well-supported in modern browsers but may not open in older software, some email clients, and certain platforms.

When to use JPG instead of WEBP:

• •Email attachments (Outlook doesn't display WEBP inline)
• •Print deliverables (most print software works with JPG, not WEBP)
• •Files shared with clients who may open them in older software
• •Any context where you can't predict the viewing environment

When WEBP is the clear choice:

• •All images served directly on a website
• •Web app images
• •Anything displayed in a modern browser

WEBP vs PNG

For images with transparency, WEBP (lossless) produces files up to 26% smaller than PNG with identical quality and full alpha channel support. For logos, icons, and cutouts where you need transparency, WEBP is technically the better choice if your platform supports it.

The practical caveat: PNG is universally supported everywhere. If you're delivering a logo to a client, placing an image in a Word document, or sharing a graphic on Slack, PNG is safer. If the image is being served on a website you control, WEBP is the better choice.

Browser and platform support

As of 2024, WEBP is supported by:

• •Chrome (since 2011)
• •Firefox (since 2019)
• •Safari (since 2020)
• •Edge (since 2018)
• •Samsung Internet, Opera, and all other modern mobile browsers

Not supported reliably by:

• •Outlook (all versions for Windows — WEBP images appear as broken attachments or blank)
• •Internet Explorer (end of life)
• •Some older Android system browsers

For websites, global browser support is above 97%. For email, use JPG or PNG.

How to implement WEBP on a website

Option 1: Serve WEBP directly

If all your visitors are on modern browsers (check your analytics — IE users are typically below 0.1% of web traffic), you can simply serve WEBP images directly. Upload WEBP instead of JPG.

Option 2: Use the HTML picture element for fallback

For maximum compatibility, use the picture element to serve WEBP to browsers that support it and JPG as a fallback:

<picture>
  <source srcset="image.webp" type="image/webp">
  <img src="image.jpg" alt="Description of the image">
</picture>

Browsers that support WEBP use the source element; others fall back to the img tag.

Option 3: CMS and platform automatic conversion

WordPress (with plugins like ShortPixel or Imagify), Shopify, and most modern CDNs (Cloudflare, Fastly) can automatically serve WEBP versions of uploaded images to browsers that support it, with JPG fallback. This is the most seamless approach if your platform supports it.

Converting existing images to WEBP

Use BG Bueno's Image Converter to convert JPG or PNG files to WEBP. The converter lets you set quality, preview the before and after, and download immediately — all in the browser without uploads.

For batch conversion of many images, consider using the command-line tool cwebp (part of Google's libwebp library) or ImageMagick, both of which support scripted batch conversion.

Is WEBP worth adopting?

For any website where image loading speed matters — e-commerce stores, blogs with lots of photography, portfolio sites — the answer is yes. A 30% reduction in image file sizes is a meaningful improvement in load time, Core Web Vitals scores, and bandwidth costs, for essentially zero effort once you've converted your image pipeline.

The main thing to watch for is email. Never send WEBP images as email attachments or inline in HTML email campaigns. For everything else in a modern browser context, WEBP is the better default.