If you've touched a frontend performance audit in the last few years, you've probably been told to "just convert everything to WebP." It's solid advice most of the time—but not always, and treating it as a blanket rule can quietly cause problems you won't notice until a designer or a client asks why their logo looks slightly off.
Here's a more honest breakdown of where WebP actually helps, where it doesn't, and how to handle the conversion without turning it into a manual chore.
What WebP actually gets you
WebP was built by Google specifically to solve the "images are too heavy" problem. Compared to JPG, lossy WebP typically shaves off 25–35% in file size at a similar visual quality. Compared to PNG, lossless WebP can cut file size by roughly 20–50%, which matters a lot for icons, screenshots, and UI graphics.
It also does a few things JPG and PNG can't do together:
