Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

Convert JPG, PNG, and Animated GIF to WEBP

By  on  

New image formats like WEP and MOZJPEG will be a major boost to load time on the web.  The majority of page load and render time is usually attributed to unoptimized images, so these new formats will make both mobile and desktop load times faster.  I've taught you how to detect WEBP support but we've not explored how to create WEBP images; let's have a look at how easy it is to convert JPG, PNG, and even animated GIF to WEBP.

Convert JPG and PNG to WEBP

My favorite open source image manipulation library, ImageMagick, doesn't have the capability to convert images to WEBP out of the box -- you'll receive an ugly error if you don't first install webp via a utility like homebrew:

brew install webp

Once webp is available, you can use ImageMagick to do the conversion:

convert logo.png logo.webp

In most cases the WEBP image, which is only available in Chrome at the time of publishing, will be significantly smaller than the original image.

Convert Animated GIF to WEBP

The webp library doesn't have the capability to convert animated GIF images to WEBP.  You'll need to download gif2webp from Google.  With gif2webp available, you can convert your animated GIF image to WEBP:

gif2webp animation.gif -o animation.webp

gif2webp provides numerous options for output modification like quality, multi-threading encoding, etc.

Imagine the boost in your site load time if you created and served WEBP images where they're supported.  Faster sites means more conversions and better user experience.  Make it happen!

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    7 Essential JavaScript Functions

    I remember the early days of JavaScript where you needed a simple function for just about everything because the browser vendors implemented features differently, and not just edge features, basic features, like addEventListener and attachEvent.  Times have changed but there are still a few functions each developer should...

  • By
    Animated 3D Flipping Menu with CSS

    CSS animations aren't just for basic fades or sliding elements anymore -- CSS animations are capable of much more.  I've showed you how you can create an exploding logo (applied with JavaScript, but all animation is CSS), an animated Photo Stack, a sweet...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools Clipboard Plugin

    The ability to place content into a user's clipboard can be extremely convenient for the user. Instead of clicking and dragging down what could be a lengthy document, the user can copy the contents of a specific area by a single click of a mouse.

  • By
    Creating Spacers with Flexbox

    I was one of the biggest fans of flexbox before it hit but, due to being shuffled around at Mozilla, I never had the chance to use it in any practice project; thus, flexbox still seems like a bit of a mystery to me.  This greatly...

Discussion

  1. pascal massimino

    Note: one important gif2webp option is -min_size. This one can be used to minimize the file size.

    This is not the default because gif2web favors minimizing the playback smoothness instead (by inserting larger keyframes at regular interval).

    skal/

  2. Cathy Mayhue

    WEBP is something which every body was waiting for, as other images took a long time to load, so this innovation is more than welcome and many thanks for sharing us with the method to convert other image formats into webp.

  3. emmze

    Since support for webp in browsers is limited right now, is there any big advantage to using webp instead of svgs? I tried some tests just now, converting some variously sized png images to both webp and svg. The resulting size was about the same (webp usually slightly smaller) but svg has much better browser support, so why not just use svgs?

  4. wottpal

    You don’t even need webp to shrink gifs for the web. Simply use mp4s instead if you want 100% browser-support. That often saves around 90% of file-size.

    Then you can modify the tag to look and behave like a gif, too. Use the inline & autoplay attributes.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!