The page-speed conversion
This is the conversion web developers run after a Lighthouse audit says "serve images in next-gen formats." PNG is the heaviest common web format; WebP is the drop-in replacement that every browser accepts. Cutting image weight by half or more directly improves Largest Contentful Paint, which is both a user-experience win and a Google ranking signal. Batch-drop your site's image folder, set quality to 85 or 90, and deploy the ZIP.
Where the savings come from
PNG compresses losslessly, spending bytes on precision no human perceives. WebP's lossy mode uses prediction from the VP8 video codec and a perceptual model, keeping what the eye notices and discarding what it does not. The savings are largest exactly where PNG is weakest, photographs and gradients, and smallest on flat-color line art, which PNG already handles well. For icons under a few kilobytes, the difference is negligible either way; keep whichever format your build pipeline prefers, or see PNG to JPG when transparency is not needed.
Common questions
How much smaller will WebP be than my PNG?+−
For photographic content stored as PNG, savings of 80 to 90% are normal. For graphics and screenshots, expect 40 to 70%. In our tests a 2.5 MB PNG screenshot became a 220 KB WebP at 90% quality with no visible difference.
Is transparency kept?+−
Yes. WebP supports alpha channels, and it compresses transparent regions far more efficiently than PNG does. Logos and UI assets convert perfectly.
Should I use lossy or lossless WebP?+−
This tool uses lossy WebP with a quality slider, which is what you want for web delivery: at 85 to 90% quality the output is visually identical to the PNG and dramatically smaller. If you need a bit-exact archival copy, keep the original PNG as your master.
Do all browsers support WebP now?+−
Yes. Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari (since version 14 in 2020) all display WebP. The compatibility concern that made developers hesitate is history; today WebP is the default recommendation of every page-speed audit, including Google PageSpeed Insights.