What is WebP? And Why Every Website is Using It Now

Ten years ago, every image on the web was either a JPEG or a PNG. Today, if you right-click and save an image from almost any major website, there is a good chance it downloads as a .webp file. What happened?

WebP in 30 Seconds

WebP is an image format created by Google in 2010. It was designed specifically for the web with one goal: make images smaller without making them look worse. It achieves this by using modern compression algorithms that are significantly more efficient than the JPEG and PNG algorithms from the 1990s.

The Numbers That Changed Everything

• WebP lossy images are 25 to 35 percent smaller than comparable JPEG files
• WebP lossless images are 20 to 30 percent smaller than PNG files
• WebP supports transparency (like PNG) AND lossy compression (like JPEG) in the same format
• WebP supports animation (replacing animated GIF at a fraction of the size)

For a website like Instagram or Pinterest that serves billions of images per day, even a 25 percent reduction in file size translates to enormous bandwidth savings and faster page loads.

Browser Support in 2026

Every major browser now supports WebP: Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, Opera, and all Chromium-based browsers. Safari was the last holdout, adding support in 2022. So there is essentially zero reason not to use WebP on websites today.

The Remaining Pain Point

Desktop software is slower to adopt. Photoshop added WebP support relatively recently. Many older applications still cannot open or save WebP files. This is why you might download an image from a website and find that your image editor rejects it.

The solution is simple: convert WebP to PNG or convert WebP to JPG using Filoshi, and the file works everywhere.