How WebP Conversion Works
A complete guide to converting images to WebP — how it works, which settings to pick, and why it makes your website faster.
The conversion process
WebPTools converts images in four simple steps — all of them happen locally on your device:
- Add your images — drag & drop, browse or paste (Ctrl + V). Your files are read straight from disk and displayed as thumbnails.
- Choose your settings — pick the output format, adjust the quality slider and optionally set maximum dimensions.
- Convert — your browser draws each image onto an HTML5 Canvas and re-encodes it in the target format using its built-in image encoder.
- Download — save images one by one, or grab everything at once as a ZIP archive.
What is WebP?
WebP is a modern image format developed by Google in 2010. It uses smarter compression techniques than JPG and PNG, producing files that are:
- 25–34% smaller than comparable JPGs in lossy mode
- about 26% smaller than PNG in lossless mode
- fully supportive of transparency (alpha channel), like PNG
- capable of animation, like GIF
Today roughly 97% of browsers in use support WebP — including Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari 14+. For the small remaining audience, websites typically serve a JPG fallback using the HTML <picture> tag (snippet below).
Recommended quality settings
The quality slider trades file size for visual quality. These starting points work well for most websites:
| Content type | Suggested quality | Typical saving |
|---|---|---|
| Photos and hero images | 75–85 | 30–50% |
| Blog and article images | 80 | 30–45% |
| Product photos | 80–85 | 25–40% |
| Screenshots and UI graphics | 80–90 | 40–60% |
| Thumbnails | 70–75 | 50–70% |
JPG vs PNG vs WebP
| Format | Best for | Transparency | Typical size |
|---|---|---|---|
| JPG | Photos, gradients | No | Baseline |
| PNG | Sharp graphics, text, screenshots | Yes | Large |
| WebP | Both — photos and graphics | Yes | 25–35% smaller than JPG |
For web developers: serve WebP with a fallback
If you run a website, upload both versions and let the browser pick WebP automatically:
<picture> <source srcset="hero.webp" type="image/webp"> <img src="hero.jpg" alt="Describe the image" width="800" height="600"> </picture>
A privacy bonus: metadata is stripped
Every time an image is re-encoded, EXIF metadata — including camera details and GPS location — is removed automatically. The files you download from WebPTools contain clean pixel data only, which is perfect for publishing images online.