Why convert GIF to WebP?
GIF was designed in the late 1980s. It stores up to 256 colors per frame and compresses each frame in a simple way, so animations grow large fast. WebP uses modern compression and handles animation too.
The same clip as WebP is usually much smaller than the GIF. How much you save depends on the content: screen recordings with large flat areas and camera clips behave differently, so compare the sizes after converting.
All modern browsers, including Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox, play animated WebP. That makes it a good fit for product demos, how to clips in help articles, animated banners and stickers on a website.
Picking a quality setting
| Setting | Good for |
|---|---|
| 92 to 100% | Screen recordings with small text, logos, pixel art |
| 75 to 90% | Most animations on blogs and shop pages |
| 40 to 70% | Background loops and previews where size matters most |
Lower settings blur fine detail first, such as text in a screen recording. Try one file at a lower setting, check it at full size, then convert the rest of the batch.
Before you replace your GIFs
WebP cannot add colors the GIF never had. If the GIF shows banding, the WebP will show it too.
Some older apps, email programs and forums still do not open WebP. Keep the original GIF for those places, or turn a WebP back with WebP to GIF. For still graphics, PNG to WebP does the same job for logos and screenshots, and GIF to PNG pulls out the first frame as a still image.
To use the new file on your site, upload the WebP and point the image tag to it, the same way you would for a GIF. The animation starts on its own, with no video player needed.