An iPhone photo has one of the most efficient photo codecs on the consumer market, and then most people undo it by publishing the JPG. For anything going onto a website — a blog post, a shop listing, a portfolio — WebP keeps most of that efficiency in a format every current browser renders natively.
What WebP buys you
Google's format dates to 2010 and is built on the same video-codec family as HEIC. For photographic content it lands roughly 25–35% smaller than JPEG at matched visual quality, and unlike JPEG it also supports transparency, so image tooling can use one format for logos and photos alike. Browser support has been complete for years, all current versions of Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge included.
The destination decides the format
Publishing to a site is the WebP case, and the payoff is concrete: smaller images mean faster page loads, and image weight is usually the largest single factor in a mobile page's load time. Sending a photo to a person or into an app is a JPG case: messaging apps recompress anyway, and photo editors on older machines still stumble on WebP. Print shops want JPEG or TIFF. Same photo, three destinations, three right answers.
Converting without a second-generation re-encode
The HEIC converter decodes the HEIC directly and encodes WebP from those pixels, one generation of compression in total, with the photo never leaving the browser tab. Drop the files, pick WebP, set the quality, download individually or as a zip for a whole set.
Picking the quality setting
- 80 is the sweet spot for web photos: at matched scale the difference from 92 is hard to find, and the file is often half the size.
- Below 65, smooth areas like skies and skin start showing banding and block artifacts — noticeable in a hero image, harmless in a thumbnail.
- 92 (the default) matches what the camera pipeline itself uses; use it when the image will be viewed full-screen or re-used later.
- Compare on a skin-tone photo. Gradients in faces are the hardest test for any lossy setting, and one look at 80 vs 92 settles the choice.
When not to bother
If the photo is heading into Instagram, iMessage or an email attachment, the platform re-encodes and strips meaning from the format choice. For archival, keep the original HEIC: it carries the full EXIF and the efficient codec already. WebP is the publishing format, not the storage format.