WEBP vs JPG
WEBP produces a visibly cleaner picture than JPG at the same file size, or the same picture at roughly a quarter less. JPG still wins on one thing only: it opens literally everywhere.
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Choose WEBP when
- Photographs on a website or in an app.
- Anywhere you are fighting a page-weight budget.
- Images that need both photographic detail and transparency, which JPG cannot do.
Choose JPG when
- Email attachments and anything going to someone on unknown software.
- Uploads to a service that rejects WEBP — plenty of older forms still do.
- Printing, where JPG remains the format print shops expect.
What WEBP actually is
WEBP does both jobs in one format: a lossy mode that beats JPG at the same visual quality, and a lossless mode that beats PNG. Unlike JPG it keeps an alpha channel, so a lossy image can still have a transparent background, which is the combination the web wanted for twenty years.
A WEBP renamed to .jpg still fails validation, because uploaders read the first bytes of the file rather than the name. Convert it properly.
What JPG actually is
JPG discards detail your eye is least likely to notice, then compresses what is left. The quality setting decides how much it discards. It is the reason photographs on the web are measured in hundreds of kilobytes rather than tens of megabytes.
Re-saving a JPG repeatedly degrades it every time, because it re-encodes from the already damaged version. Edit from the original, and export to JPG once at the end.
WEBP and JPG side by side
| WEBP | JPG | |
|---|---|---|
| Extension | .webp | .jpg |
| Media type | image/webp | image/jpeg |
| Compression | Lossy | Lossy |
| Transparency | Yes | No |
| Animation | Yes | No |
| Quality setting | Yes | Yes |
| We can write it | Yes | Yes |
Questions
How much smaller is WEBP really?
On ordinary photographs, about 25–35% at a quality most people cannot tell apart. The gap widens on images with flat areas and narrows on very noisy ones.
Will converting JPG to WEBP make it worse?
Slightly, in principle: you are re-encoding something already lossy. At a sensible quality the loss is invisible and the file is much smaller, which is usually the trade people want.