How much bigger or smaller will the WebP file be?

Smaller, usually dramatically so — JPEG files are 25-35% larger than a WebP of the same visual quality. The exact saving depends on the image, but photographic content at quality 80-85 commonly lands at a third of the original.

More about converting JPEG to WebP

JPEG is joint photographic experts group image (.jpeg). Converting JPEG to WebP cuts 25-35% off the file at matched quality — the same page-weight win as JPG, since the two are one format.

WebP is the default currency of fast web pages — smaller than JPEG at the same visual quality, smaller than PNG while keeping transparency, and supported by every browser in use. In practice that means a page that loads faster on mobile, a better Largest Contentful Paint score, and less CDN bandwidth — for the same picture. JPEG files are 25-35% larger than a WebP of the same visual quality, so this is usually the single biggest weight saving available on a page built from them.

Both formats are lossy, so a small amount of generational loss is added on re-encode. Invisible above quality 80. WebP tops out at 16383 pixels on either edge, so anything larger is scaled to fit; for the vast majority of web work that ceiling is nowhere near a constraint.

When you'd use this

Reasons to convert JPEG to WebP usually come down to compatibility, file-size, or specific feature requirements. Common situations:

  • An app or platform only accepts WebP uploads.
  • You need a feature unique to WebP (e.g. transparency, vector scaling, animation, multi-page pages, etc.) that JPEG doesn't provide.
  • You're optimising file size — modern formats often produce smaller files than the older format you started with.
  • You need a single archival format across a project so files behave consistently in the same viewer.

How to do it in webp.now

  1. Open the JPEG → WebP tool on webp.now.
  2. Drag your JPEG file onto the drop zone, or click Select files. You can drop a whole folder of files at once.
  3. The output is fixed to WebP. If the format supports extra options (page size, transparency background, quality, EXIF stripping), tweak them in the right-hand panel.
  4. Click Convert. The job runs on our server and finishes in a few seconds for typical photos.
  5. Download the result. Files stay in storage for 24 hours and are then permanently deleted.

The entire flow is free for the first 10 jobs per day with no signup required. A free account doubles that quota; a premium plan removes the limit entirely.

Tips and common pitfalls

  • Quality 80-85 is the sweet spot for photographs — visually indistinguishable from the original at normal viewing sizes, and roughly a third the weight of the equivalent JPG.
  • Use lossless WebP for logos, icons, screenshots and line art. Lossy compression puts visible fuzz around hard edges and text.
  • Convert from the highest-resolution JPEG you have and let the resize option produce the display size — downscaling before compressing beats compressing then downscaling.
  • Strip metadata for web delivery. EXIF blocks can add tens of kilobytes to a file nobody will ever read them from.
  • Serve WebP through a element with a JPG fallback if you still support very old browsers or need images to survive email clients.
Try the JPEG → WebP tool
Free, no signup required. Files deleted in 24 h.
Open JPEG → WebP
Back to all FAQ