Convert HEIF to WebP Online

HEIF is high efficiency image format. Photographers shooting HEIF on Sony, Samsung or Nikon bodies hit the same wall iPhone users do — the files are compact but no browser will show them. WebP is the web-ready equivalent.

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. HEIF files are comparable to WebP, often slightly smaller, so this is usually the single biggest weight saving available on a page built from them.

Extras stored in the HEIF container — depth maps, image sequences, 10-bit HDR — do not carry over; you get the main still image. 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.

WebP was released by Google in September 2010, built on the intra-frame compression of the VP8 video codec Google acquired with On2 Technologies. Lossless mode (VP8L) and alpha transparency arrived in 2011, animation in 2012. Adoption stalled for most of a decade because Safari refused to ship it, so sites had to serve fallbacks anyway. That ended in September 2020 when Apple enabled WebP in Safari 14, macOS Big Sur and iOS 14 — overnight the format became genuinely universal in browsers. Today Next.js, Cloudflare, Cloudinary, imgix, WordPress and Shopify all emit WebP by default, which is why so many images saved from the web now land on disk as a .webp file.

This is the classic pairing of a capture format with a delivery format. HEIC compresses beautifully — it is why iPhones have shot it by default since iOS 11 — but no browser will render one, so an iPhone photo cannot go on a web page as-is. WebP keeps the small file size and works in every browser in current use.

Bloggers, e-commerce sellers and content teams who shoot product and article photography on a phone convert to WebP before uploading. It keeps page payloads small, protects Core Web Vitals scores, and avoids the outright rejection that WordPress, Shopify and most upload forms still hand out to HEIC files.

Because both formats use modern lossy codecs, the size change is modest — unlike converting to JPG, where files usually grow. Converting at quality 80–90 preserves the visual quality of the original. Extras the HEIC container carries that WebP has no concept of — Live Photo motion, depth maps, 10-bit HDR colour — are dropped; you get the main still image.