JPG vs PNG vs WebP: Which Image Format Should You Use?

# JPG vs PNG vs WebP: Which One Should You Actually Use?

I'll be honest — for years I just saved everything as JPG and hoped for the best. Then one day a logo I exported looked terrible, with weird smudges around the edges, and I finally decided to figure out what these formats actually do differently.

Here's what I wish someone had told me earlier.

JPG: the old reliable

JPG is what your camera has been producing forever. It's great at one thing: photos. Gradients, skin tones, skies — JPG compresses those beautifully.

But it has two annoying habits. First, it throws away detail every time you save. Edit a JPG, save it, edit again, save again — and it slowly turns to mush. Second, it can't do transparency. At all.

**Use JPG when:** you're sharing a photo and nobody will edit it afterwards.

PNG: the perfectionist

PNG never loses quality. Save it a hundred times and it looks identical. It also handles transparency, which is why every logo and screenshot you've ever downloaded was probably a PNG.

The catch? File sizes. A photo saved as PNG can easily be five to ten times bigger than the same photo as a JPG. For screenshots and graphics with flat colors, PNG is perfect. For photos, it's overkill.

**Use PNG when:** you need transparency, or you're saving screenshots, logos, or anything with sharp text.

WebP: the one you should probably be using

WebP is Google's format, and honestly, it does almost everything better. Smaller files than JPG at the same quality, transparency like PNG, and every modern browser supports it now.

When I switched my site images to WebP, pages loaded noticeably faster. The only downside is that some old software still doesn't open it — though that's getting rarer every year.

**Use WebP when:** the image is going on a website. Pretty much always.

So what's the verdict?

• Photos for the web → **WebP** (or JPG if you need maximum compatibility)
• Logos, icons, screenshots → **PNG**
• Anything you want small and modern → **WebP**

And if your files are still too big after picking the right format, run them through our compressor — you'd be surprised how much weight you can shave off without anyone noticing a difference.