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What is WebP?

WebP is Google's image format, made to cut page weight. It works everywhere on the web and nowhere else, which is why a downloaded .webp file is so irritating.

Updated 2026-08-04

WebP is an image format Google released in 2010. Almost nobody chooses to create one. People meet it because they saved a picture from a website and got a file ending in .webp that their photo editor refuses to open.

That mismatch is the whole story of the format: it was designed for the trip from a web server to a browser, and it is very good at that trip. It was not designed to be a file you keep, and it shows.

If you already have one sitting on your desktop and just want it usable, jump to converting WebP to JPG. This page explains what the thing actually is.

Where it came from

Google had bought On2 Technologies, a video codec company, and used its VP8 codec as the basis of the WebM video format. A video codec spends most of its effort compressing single still frames — keyframes — so Google took the keyframe compressor out of VP8, wrapped it in a RIFF container, and shipped it as an image format.

That heritage explains a few oddities, including the fact that the first twelve bytes of every WebP file read RIFF followed by WEBP, and that the format inherited a 16,383 pixel limit on each dimension.

Later versions added a second, entirely separate lossless compression mode, plus transparency and animation. So WebP is really three formats sharing a file extension: lossy WebP, lossless WebP, and animated WebP.

Why websites use it

It is smaller. In lossy mode, WebP typically produces files 25 to 35 percent smaller than JPEG at comparable visual quality. In lossless mode it usually beats PNG by around 25 percent.

Size is now a ranking and revenue matter. Images are the largest part of most pages by weight, and page load time affects both search ranking and conversion. Cutting a third off the images is one of the few optimizations that is nearly free to apply and measurable afterwards.

It replaces two formats with one. Before WebP, a site needed JPEG for photographs and PNG for anything with transparency. WebP does both, with an alpha channel available in lossy mode as well — something JPEG has never offered.

Nobody has to be asked. Browsers announce which formats they accept in an HTTP header on every request. A server or CDN reads that header and sends WebP to browsers that say they can take it, JPEG to those that do not. The site can adopt WebP without breaking a single visitor, which is why adoption was so fast once support arrived.

Why the downloaded file is so annoying

Everything above concerns the browser. The moment the file leaves the browser, none of it applies.

You right-click, choose Save image as, and get photo.webp. Then:

  • The photo editor you have owned for six years does not open it.
  • The print shop’s upload form rejects it.
  • Your content management system accepts it and then serves a broken image to somebody running an old device.
  • Windows shows a generic icon instead of a thumbnail, on older installs.
  • You email it to a colleague and they reply asking what a webp is.

None of this is a fault in the format. It is a format optimized for a context that ended the moment you saved the file. The site chose WebP for its own page weight; you inherited the choice without being asked, and now you are holding a file whose only advantage was already spent in transit.

This is also why “just convert it” is the right instinct and why renaming the extension is not the way to do it.

Support, as it stands

Browsers: complete. Chrome had it from the start. Firefox added it in 2019. Safari was the holdout and added it in September 2020 with Safari 14, which is the moment WebP became usable as a universal web format rather than a Chrome optimization.

Operating systems: fine on anything current. Windows 10 and 11 display WebP in File Explorer and Photos. macOS has handled it in Preview and Quick Look since Big Sur.

Desktop applications: mixed, and this is where the friction lives. Photoshop needed a third-party plugin until version 23.2 in early 2022. Plenty of older installed software, scanning utilities, printer drivers, photo frames, and in-house tools have never been updated and never will be.

Upload forms: unpredictable. A form that validates by file extension against a list written in 2016 will refuse a WebP no matter what the browser thinks.

The practical rule that falls out of this: WebP is safe for images you publish on a website, and unreliable for images you send to a person or a system you do not control. That is the same rule as for HEIC, for the same reason. A better file that the recipient cannot open is a worse file.

Should you make WebP files yourself?

If you run a website, yes, and your CMS or CDN probably does it for you already. The saving is real and the risk is close to zero because of content negotiation.

For anything else, no. Keep JPEG for photographs you send around and PNG for graphics that need transparency. If your reason for wanting WebP is file size, the honest answer is that a well-compressed JPEG gets you most of the way there without any of the compatibility tax. The image compressor will hit an exact target size in JPEG, and how to reduce file size covers the cases where the image is not the problem.

More on this

  • How to convert WebP to JPGRenaming the file to .jpg does not work, and here is exactly why. These are the methods that do, on Windows, Mac and in the browser.