What quality setting is best for compressing WebP?
Every WebP is a trade-off between file size and visible quality, and for almost every photo that trade-off lands between quality 70 and 85. Above 90, files balloon in size while the visual difference becomes nearly impossible to spot — a 95%-quality image can be three times larger than its 80% twin with no perceptible gain. Below 60, the trade-off turns ugly fast: smooth skies develop banding, sharp edges grow halos, and skin tones pick up blotchy blocks. That is why this compressor starts its search at 90% and works downward, stopping at the highest quality that still fits your target. Most images compressed to 100–200KB land somewhere in the 70–85 window, which is exactly where the sweet spot lives.
How do I compress a WebP without losing quality?
The honest truth is that every lossy WebP compression discards some data — that is how the format squeezes files so small. The trick is losing data you cannot see. Three habits keep quality intact. First, always compress from the original image, never from an already-compressed copy; each re-encode throws away more detail, so an image compressed twice looks noticeably worse than one compressed once to the same size. Second, use target-size mode instead of guessing a quality number: the binary search finds the gentlest compression that hits your goal, which beats blindly picking 60% and hoping. Third, when an image is enormous — say 6000 pixels wide from a modern phone — shrinking the dimensions gives far bigger savings than squeezing quality. Reducing a 6000px image to 2000px cuts the pixel count by nearly 90%, and on a screen nobody can tell. This tool does exactly that automatically: if quality 10% still cannot reach your target, it shrinks the image in 10% steps, never below 320 pixels wide, and searches again.
When is WebP better than JPG or PNG?
WebP is the modern all-rounder: it compresses photos 25–35% smaller than JPG at equal visual quality, and unlike JPG it also supports transparency and lossless mode, which lets it replace PNG for many graphics too. Every current browser, phone, and major app opens WebP without thinking — the only place JPG still wins is universality with very old software, email clients, and printers. If your image is destined for the web, WebP is almost always the better choice: smaller files, faster pages, same look. If it is headed for print or an ancient office computer, convert to JPG instead — and this site converts both ways.