WebP vs JPG vs PNG: Which Image Format Should You Use in 2026?

Right-click an image on almost any big website and “Save as” suggests a .webp file. Try to upload that same file to a government form, an older app or a print shop, and it may be refused. Meanwhile your screenshots are PNGs, your camera photos are JPGs (or HEIC, if you have an iPhone), and you’re not quite sure whether any of it matters.

It does, a little. The right format can make a website noticeably faster, keep a logo crisp, or simply get a file accepted. Here is how the three main formats differ, plus the newer AVIF, and which to use when.

The formats at a glance

JPG: the format everything understands

JPG has been the default for photographs since the early 1990s, and it is still the safest choice when you don’t know what the other side can open. It is lossy: it discards fine detail your eye is unlikely to miss, which is why a photo can drop from 5 MB to 500 KB and still look fine.

The weaknesses show up on sharp edges and flat colours. Text, line drawings and screenshots get faint smudges (“artefacts”) around every edge. JPG has no transparency, so a logo always sits on a rectangle. And every time you edit and save a JPG again, it loses a little more.

Use JPG for: photos you email, print, post or upload to forms and job portals.

PNG: sharp edges and transparency

PNG is lossless: the image you open is exactly the image you saved. That makes it ideal for screenshots, interface designs, charts, logos and anything with text in it. It supports full transparency, so a logo can sit cleanly on any background.

The cost is size. A photograph saved as PNG can easily be five or more times larger than the same photo as a JPG, without looking any better. PNG is the wrong choice for photos.

Use PNG for: screenshots, logos, icons, diagrams, images with text, and anything that needs a transparent background.

WebP: smaller files for the web

WebP was created by Google to make web pages lighter. It can work either way, lossy like JPG or lossless like PNG, and it supports transparency and animation. Google’s own figures put lossy WebP at 25–34% smaller than comparable JPGs, and lossless WebP at about 26% smaller than PNGs.

On the web, compatibility is no longer an issue: every current browser displays WebP, including Safari since 2020. The gaps are elsewhere. Some desktop programs, older phones, print services and, most commonly, official upload forms still don’t accept it. That is why a downloaded WebP sometimes won’t open in an older photo viewer.

Use WebP for: images on your own website or blog, where smaller files mean faster pages.

What about AVIF?

AVIF is newer and often compresses even better than WebP, especially for photos. Browser support has caught up: Chrome since 2020, Safari since version 16, Firefox since 2023 and Edge since early 2024, which means it now works in all the major browsers. Encoding AVIF is slower, though, and support outside browsers is still patchy. For most websites, WebP is the comfortable middle ground today; AVIF is worth it if you serve a lot of large photos and your platform can produce it with a fallback.

Which format for which job

Converting between formats

All of these conversions run in your browser on CleanPDF, with nothing uploaded:

• JPG to WebP and PNG to WebP to make website images lighter.
• WebP to JPG and WebP to PNG when a site or app won’t accept WebP.
• PNG to JPG for photos that were saved as PNG by mistake, and JPG to PNG when an editor needs PNG.
• The Image Converter for anything else, including HEIC, GIF, TIFF and BMP.

A note on transparency

JPG can’t store transparency. When you convert a transparent PNG or WebP to JPG, the transparent areas have to be filled with a colour, usually white. That is fine for a logo on a white page and wrong for a logo on a dark website. If the background must stay transparent, convert to PNG or WebP instead.

For website owners

• Resize images to the largest size they are actually displayed at before converting. A 4000-pixel photo shown 800 pixels wide wastes far more bytes than any format choice saves.
• Serve WebP to browsers and keep the JPG or PNG original in your media library.
• Use quality around 75–85 for WebP photos; the difference from 100 is rarely visible, and the size difference is large.
• Use SVG for logos and icons wherever possible.

Common mistakes

• Saving photos as PNG and wondering why they are huge.
• Saving screenshots as JPG and getting fuzzy text.
• Uploading WebP to a form that only accepts JPG.
• Renaming .webp to .jpg. The file is still WebP inside; convert it properly.
• Re-saving JPGs repeatedly while editing. Work from the original and export once.

Frequently asked questions