The short answer: WebP for almost everything. The longer answer is worth the two minutes.

Format advice goes stale fast, so let me ground this in what browsers actually support right now. Every major browser has handled WebP for years. AVIF is the shiny newcomer and mostly supported, but "mostly" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Photos: WebP

For photographs on the web, WebP is the default I reach for. Smaller than JPG at the same visual quality, supported everywhere that matters, and it even handles transparency if you need it.

JPG is the fallback. If you're dealing with a system that chokes on WebP (some email clients, older CMS plugins), JPG still works everywhere and always will.

Logos and icons: SVG first, PNG second

Here's where people waste the most bytes. A logo is a handful of shapes. Saving it as a PNG photograph of those shapes is like filming a painting to show someone the colors.

SVG is the file format for logos, icons, and simple graphics. It's a text file describing shapes, so it scales to any size with zero blur and often weighs less than a kilobyte. If your logo has flat colors and clean lines, it should be an SVG.

PNG is the answer when the graphic has effects SVG can't do well: drop shadows, gradients baked into a photo-like texture, that sort of thing.

The one format to learn about, not use yet

AVIF compresses even better than WebP. The catch is spotty support in older browsers and editing tools that still look at it funny. I convert my personal projects to AVIF to stay sharp, but I ship WebP to clients. Client sites need to work, not impress me.

Practical tip: check your site's images with your browser's dev tools (right-click, Inspect, Network tab, filter by Img). Sort by size. The biggest files are your format problems. Convert those first.

Making the switch

You don't need to reconvert your whole library tonight. Start with the images on your most-visited pages. Upload them to Jiggle X Wiggle's free converter, switch them to WebP, and swap the files.

WebP in 2026. SVG for logos. JPG when something needs to work absolutely everywhere. That's the whole playbook.