Convert PNG to WebP Online
Turn PNG files into WebP images that load fast and render in every browser.
Drop your PNG file here
or click to select
How PNG to WebP works
Upload PNG
Drag & drop or click to select your PNG file.
Choose Options
Adjust quality, size, or other output settings if needed.
Download WebP
Click Convert and your WebP file downloads instantly.
About PNG to WebP conversion
PNG is portable network graphics. Lossless WebP beats PNG by roughly 26% on the same image with identical pixels and identical transparency — a free saving on logos, icons and UI sprites. For screenshots and flat illustrations where a little loss is acceptable, lossy WebP with alpha cuts far deeper than that.
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. PNG files are typically 25-35% larger than lossless WebP, and several times larger than lossy WebP, so this is usually the single biggest weight saving available on a page built from them.
If the source PNG is a photograph rather than a graphic, choose lossy WebP — lossless mode will save far less than you expect on continuous-tone detail. 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.
Where WebP comes from
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.
PNG vs WebP at a glance
| PNG | WebP | |
|---|---|---|
| Compression | Lossless DEFLATE | Lossy VP8 or lossless VP8L |
| Transparency | Full 8-bit alpha | Full 8-bit alpha in both modes |
| Animation | Not supported (APNG is a separate extension) | Native animation support |
| Colour depth | 8-bit and 16-bit per channel, plus palette modes | 8-bit per channel, sRGB |
| Where it opens | Universal since the late 1990s | Every current browser; patchy in desktop applications |
| Typical file size | Typically 25-35% larger than lossless webp, and several times larger than lossy webp | The baseline |
Real-world workflow — Developer rebuilding an image-heavy page
- Collect the PNG source files — often hundreds of them in one folder
- Batch-convert to WebP at quality 82 with metadata stripped
- Resize on the way out to the largest size the layout actually displays
- Wire them into a
element with a JPG fallback for legacy clients - Ship it and watch the page-weight and Core Web Vitals numbers move
Recommended conversion settings
| Use case | Settings |
|---|---|
| Photographs and hero images | Quality 80-85 — visually lossless, roughly a third of JPG's weight |
| Logos, icons and line art | Lossless mode — no fuzz around hard edges |
| Thumbnails and list images | Quality 70-75, resized to the display size first |
| Images with transparency | Either mode keeps full 8-bit alpha; lossy is far smaller |
| Archival or re-editable copies | Keep the original — WebP is a delivery format, not a master |
Where will your WebP file open?
| Platform | PNG | WebP |
|---|---|---|
| Chrome / Edge / Firefox | ✓ | ✓ |
| Safari 14+ / iOS 14+ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Windows Photos | ✓ | ✓ |
| macOS Preview & Quick Look | ✓ | ✓ |
| Adobe Photoshop | ✓ | ~ |
| Microsoft Office 2021+ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Email clients (Outlook, Gmail) | ✓ | ✗ |
| Social media uploaders | ✓ | ~ |
| Print & prepress (RIP) | ✓ | ✗ |
When to convert PNG to WebP
Converting PNG to WebP gets you the best of both. Lossless WebP preserves PNG's pixel-perfect quality and full alpha channel while landing roughly 26% smaller — a free saving on icons, logos, sprites and UI graphics with no visual difference whatsoever. For assets that need both transparency and zero quality loss, this is simply a better encoding of the same image.
Where PNG really struggles is photographs and screenshots with photographic content: lossless compression handles continuous-tone detail badly, and those files are often enormous. Switching those to lossy WebP with alpha frequently cuts 80% or more, and unlike a JPG conversion it keeps the transparency.
Build pipelines are the natural home for this. Converting a PNG icon library as part of the build is a standard front-end performance step, and at CDN scale the individually modest savings compound into meaningful bandwidth and cost reductions.
PNG to WebP tips
- 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 PNG 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.
Related tools
Formats involved
PNG – Portable Network Graphics
WebP – Web Picture Format (Google)
PNG to WebP — frequently asked questions
Related guides & articles
Maybe you wanted something else?
- You want the smallest possible file and can require a modern browser → WebP to AVIF
- You only want to shrink what you already have → Compress WebP
- You need maximum compatibility instead of minimum size → WebP to JPG
- You want to pick a different output format → Image Converter
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