Best File Format For Web Images

3 min readJul 22, 2022

1. Google’s WebP (Lightweight with Great Quality)

This open format has been developed by Google & released in April, 2018.
It makes image files smaller than PNGs & are faster to load.
WebP lossless images are 26% smaller in size compared to PNGs.
WebP lossy images are 25–34% smaller than comparable JPEG images at equivalent quality.
Lossless WebP supports transparency at a cost of just 22% additional bytes.
WebP also supports transparency, typically providing much smaller file sizes compared to PNG.
Make files smaller at the same quality level, reduce page speed loading times & get more organic traffic to your website.
Many Big companies has already switched to WebP — Facebook reports 80% data savings compared with use of PNG files
WebP is natively supported in Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, the Opera browser, & by many other tools & software libraries.
Developers have also added support to a variety of image editing tools.

It is well known SVGs are vector files & are immune to resolutions, means they can be expanded or shrunk down to any size without loss of quality.
Image size & display type don’t matter with SVGs — they always look the same.
Unlike other file formats on this list SVG is a vector file & your image can be resized without losing quality.
This may be very useful for a logo images, website users can enlarge your logo to full screen & see crisp & clean lines.
SVGs can be used as one image for both larger or smaller devices like old phone or large retina display, without compromising quality.
SVG files can be easily edited as they have XML code.
SVGs can be best used for icons, logos & QR codes etc.

Portable Network Graphics (PNG) was released in 1997.
It was a standard file format for web images for many years.
PNG files does not loose the quality after image compression.
PNG format supports a large number of colors & is suitable for different types of digital images, including photographs & graphics.
Image transparency is one of the great reasons PNGs are widely used.
PNG images are widely used for larger images such as banners, transparent images

JPEG (jpg) format was designed for lossy compression of images like digital photography.
It is not suitable for logos with lines, curves & text & sharp contrasts can cause noticeable artefacts
JPEG is the most common image format used by digital cameras & other photographic image capture devices.
The JPEG compression algorithm operates at its best on photographs & paintings of realistic scenes with smooth variations of tone & color.
JPEG is not well suited for line drawings & other textual or iconic graphics, where the sharp contrasts between adjacent pixels can cause noticeable artefacts.

It must be clear to you after reading above points that WebP and SVG are clear winners but PNG and JPEG has their own advantages.

I personally use WebP for banners, sliders, photos and SVGs for icons, logos and QR codes.

Also read How Do I Optimise Images For My Websites so that you can load your website faster.

Hope it helps!!

Cheers!!

Sangwin Gawande