PNG to WebP Converter

The quality setting behaves differently depending on what your image contains, and PNG source images are usually the kind WebP has to be handled carefully with.

• 95–100 — Effectively indistinguishable from the PNG. Use this for logos, icons, screenshots and anything containing text. Files are larger but still usually beat the original PNG.
• 80–94 — The general-purpose range. 85 is the default here and works well for illustrations, photographs and mixed content.
• 60–79 — Clearly smaller files. Fine for large background images; beginning to soften fine detail.
• Below 60 — Only when size is the overriding concern.

A specific warning worth knowing: because PNG is commonly used for graphics rather than photographs, lossy WebP at a middling quality can look worse on a PNG source than the same setting would on a photo. Flat colour areas can develop faint blotching, and crisp edges can pick up a halo. If your image is a logo, diagram, screenshot or anything with text, raise the quality rather than accepting the default.

Semi-transparent pixels are compressed too. A very soft shadow at low quality can band into visible steps, which is another reason to stay high when transparency is doing delicate work.

When PNG to WebP is the right move

• Anything on a website. This is the strongest case. You keep transparency, lose a large amount of file size, and improve page load speed — which affects both search ranking and how many visitors stay.
• Icon and logo sets. A folder of PNG assets converted to WebP often drops to a third of its original size with no visible change.
• Screenshots for documentation. At high quality, WebP handles text far better than JPG while staying much smaller than PNG.
• App and game assets, where download size matters and the runtime already decodes WebP.

When to keep the PNG

Keep the PNG if you are handing the file to someone else and cannot be sure what will open it. Design tools, older office software, some content management systems and a number of upload forms still reject WebP — and an image nobody can open is worse than a large one.

Keep it too for master copies you will edit repeatedly. Converting to lossy WebP and editing from that starts a chain of generational loss. Work from the PNG, and export WebP as the final step.

Does converting to WebP lose transparency?

No — and this is the question worth being unambiguous about, because it is the main thing people get wrong when choosing between WebP and JPG. WebP stores a genuine alpha channel with the same 256 levels of transparency PNG offers. Fully transparent stays fully transparent, and partially transparent pixels keep their exact opacity.

You do not need to pick a background colour on this page, and there is no setting for it, because there is nothing to fill in. If you convert the same PNG to JPG instead, you will be asked for one, because JPG has no way to store transparency at all.

Going back again

If you need a PNG later, converting WebP back to PNG restores the container and the transparency, but not detail removed by lossy compression. Converted at high quality this is rarely noticeable — but as always, keep your original if it matters.