WebP vs JPG vs PNG: Which Should You Actually Use?

JPG: old but still useful

JPG has been around since 1992. That's older than most of the people using it. And it's still one of the most common image formats on the internet, which says something about how good it is at its job.

JPG is a lossy format designed for photographs. It works by analysing areas of similar color and reducing the detail in those areas. Gradients in a sky, smooth skin tones, out-of-focus backgrounds — JPG handles all of these efficiently because the compression loss is hard to see in continuous-tone images.

Where JPG struggles: sharp edges, text in images, graphics with flat colors. If you screenshot a webpage and save it as JPG, the text will get blurry artefacts around it. Use PNG or WebP for that kind of content.

JPG doesn't support transparency. If you have a logo with a transparent background and you save it as JPG, the transparency becomes white or black. This bites people constantly.

JPG is also a “generation loss” format. Every time you open a JPG and resave it, quality degrades slightly. Keep originals in a lossless format if you plan to edit files multiple times.

PNG: lossless and honest about it

PNG is lossless. That means when you save a PNG, nothing is thrown away. The image you save is identical to the image you started with — guaranteed.

This makes PNG excellent for: screenshots, logos, illustrations, UI elements, anything with text, and anything that needs a transparent background. PNG supports full alpha transparency, meaning you can have semi-transparent edges, shadows, and gradients over any background color.

The downside is file size. A photograph saved as PNG will almost always be much larger than the same photo saved as JPG or WebP. PNG is not the right format for photography on the web unless there's a specific reason to need lossless quality.

But here's the nuance: “compressing” a PNG doesn't mean throwing away data. PNG files can be optimized by finding more efficient ways to encode the same data internally. Tools like pngquant do this well — and can sometimes reduce PNG file sizes by 50-70% without changing a single pixel.

WebP: the better JPG that almost nobody complained about

WebP was developed by Google and released in 2010. It took about a decade for browser support to catch up. As of now, every major browser supports it. Safari added full support in 2020. It's safe to use.

WebP does what JPG does, but smaller. At the same perceived visual quality, WebP files are typically 25-35% smaller than JPG. For a website with lots of photography, switching to WebP is one of the highest-impact performance improvements you can make without redesigning anything.

WebP also supports transparency (like PNG) and animation (like GIF). It combines the strengths of both formats into one. Animated WebP files are typically 64-75% smaller than equivalent GIFs.

The limitation: WebP isn't great for every use case. Very old systems, certain print workflows, and some software that hasn't been updated in years may not handle WebP. For most people, this isn't a real problem.

The comparison, side by side

So which one should you use?

For websites: WebP first, JPG as a fallback for very old browsers you care about. PNG for logos, icons and UI elements with transparency.

For emails: JPG. Email clients have inconsistent WebP support. PNG works but files are larger than they need to be for photos.

For social media: JPG or PNG, depending on what the platform accepts. Most platforms re-compress your image anyway, so format matters less here than you might think.

For documents and archiving: PNG for graphics and screenshots. Keep original photos in a RAW format if your camera supports it, otherwise JPG at high quality.

For printing: None of the above, ideally. Print uses TIFF or PDF. But if you have to use one of these three, PNG gives you lossless quality and JPG at 95%+ is usually acceptable.