A few years ago, if you mentioned WebP to most web developers you'd get a shrug. Google made it, nobody was sure if Safari would ever support it, and the file size savings weren't quite compelling enough to deal with the compatibility headaches. Then Safari added support, Edge followed, and suddenly WebP went from 'interesting experiment' to 'the format you should probably be using.'
So should you switch? The short answer is yes, for new images on websites, it's generally the right call. But there's nuance to when it actually matters and when it doesn't.
What WebP actually does differently
JPEG has been around since 1992. It's great at photos but uses a compression algorithm that was designed around the limits of computing power from that era. PNG came along and handled graphics and images with sharp edges much better, but at the cost of larger files.
WebP essentially tries to beat both at their own game. For photos, it typically produces files about 25-35% smaller than JPEG at equivalent visual quality. For graphics and images with transparency, it beats PNG by 25-45% in file size while keeping lossless quality available. The trick is that it was built on top of VP8, Google's video compression technology, which is genuinely more efficient than older image compression approaches.
In practice, that means a 200KB JPEG becomes roughly 130-150KB as a WebP. Across a page with eight or ten images, that's a meaningful reduction in load time.
Is browser support actually good now?
Yes. This was the real blocker for years and it's no longer a problem. Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari all support WebP. As of 2026, global support is above 97%. The only realistic holdout is someone using an ancient browser, and at that point they've got bigger problems than image format support.
Where WebP still causes friction is outside the browser. If you try to open a WebP file in older image editing software or send one to someone who wants to open it in Windows Photo Viewer from 2012, you might hit issues. For web delivery, support is solid. For sharing image files between people who might open them in desktop apps, stick with JPEG.
Lossy vs lossless - which should you use?
This is one of WebP's genuine advantages over JPEG and PNG: you get both options in one format.
For photos, use lossy WebP. A quality setting of 75-85 produces images that look essentially identical to the original at significantly smaller file sizes. Below 70, you start seeing artifacts similar to over-compressed JPEGs.
For logos, icons, screenshots, or anything with sharp edges and flat colors, use lossless WebP. It keeps the crisp edges that lossy compression would soften, while still being smaller than the equivalent PNG.
The simplest rule: if the original was a JPEG, export as lossy WebP. If the original was a PNG, try lossless WebP first and see if the size difference is worth it.
When the conversion is worth the effort
If you run a site with a lot of images and you care about page speed - and you should, because Google uses it as a ranking signal - converting to WebP is worth doing. Not manually, though. That would take forever and you'd go mad. You want this automated: either at the build step, through a CDN that serves WebP automatically when the browser supports it, or through an image optimization service.
For a small blog with fifteen images, the conversion effort probably isn't worth a significant time investment. For an e-commerce site with thousands of product photos, it absolutely is.
One thing I'd suggest: keep your originals. Convert to WebP for web delivery but don't throw away the PNGs and JPEGs. WebP is great for the browser, but it's not universally useful for everything else.