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Convert PNG to WebP

Turn a PNG into a WebP in your browser — much smaller for the web, and unlike JPEG it keeps the transparency.

Your images never leave your browser

Drop images to convert

or click to browse, or paste with Ctrl/Cmd+V — drop several at once to process a whole batch

PNG to WebP at a glance

The format that finally replaces the PNG on a web page

For years the choice for a web image was a bad one: JPEG if it was a photograph and you did not need transparency, PNG if you did and you could live with the file size. WebP is the format that stopped forcing that choice. It compresses photographic content roughly as well as JPEG, it handles flat colour and hard edges far better than JPEG does, and it carries a full alpha channel, so a logo with a soft shadow can be small and transparent.

That last part is what makes this the right conversion for most PNGs headed for a website. A PNG with transparency has no small equivalent in JPEG — converting it there would fill the transparent pixels with white and ruin it — so before WebP the only option was to ship the large PNG. Here you keep the alpha and typically lose half to three quarters of the file size.

Be clear about what kind of WebP this produces. The conversion runs through the browser's canvas encoder, which writes lossy WebP at the quality you choose on the slider. Lossless WebP is a different mode of the format, and no browser exposes it through a canvas, so it is not something this tool can offer. At quality 90 the result is visually indistinguishable from the PNG for almost any photograph; for a screenshot with small text, compare them at 100% before you commit.

Support is no longer a reason to hesitate: every current browser reads WebP, and has since Safari 14 in 2020. The one thing to keep in mind is that WebP is a format for the web, not for handing to other people — plenty of desktop software still refuses it, which is exactly why the reverse conversion is one of the most-used pages on this site. Everything runs locally and nothing is uploaded.

How to convert PNG to WebP

  1. Drop your PNG on the panel above — or paste it, or drop several at once to do a batch.
  2. The output format is already set to WebP, and it stays set: dropping a file does not change it back.
  3. Set the quality slider — 85 to 90 keeps the result visually identical.
  4. Download the WebP, or run the batch and take a ZIP of the lot.
  5. Nothing was uploaded at any point — the conversion ran on your own machine, in this tab.

Questions

Does WebP keep the transparency from my PNG?

Yes. WebP stores a real per-pixel alpha channel, exactly as PNG does, so soft edges and cut-outs come through unchanged. This is the reason to choose WebP over JPEG for a transparent PNG: JPEG has no alpha channel, so converting there fills every transparent pixel with white and there is no setting that avoids it.

Is the WebP this produces lossless?

No. It uses the browser's canvas encoder, which writes lossy WebP at the quality you set on the slider. WebP does have a lossless mode, and it is genuinely excellent on screenshots and flat graphics, but no browser exposes it through the canvas API — so a lossless WebP needs a command-line tool such as cwebp. At quality 90 the lossy result is visually identical for almost anything photographic.

Is it safe to use WebP on a live site?

Yes for a normal audience. Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera and Safari have all supported it since Safari 14 shipped in 2020, which covers the overwhelming majority of real traffic. If you must serve something older, use a <picture> element with a JPEG or PNG fallback rather than skipping WebP altogether — the browsers that understand WebP will take it and the rest will take the fallback.

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