AVIF vs WebP is a question worth asking if you care about page speed: AVIF routinely produces smaller files than WebP at the same visual quality, but it comes with real tradeoffs that make "just switch to AVIF" the wrong answer for some situations.
Why AVIF is smaller
AVIF's compression is derived from the AV1 video codec — genuinely newer, more sophisticated compression math than WebP is built on. In practice, that tends to mean noticeably smaller files than WebP at comparable visual quality, particularly on photographic images with lots of detail and gradients.
The cost: encode time
That improved compression comes at a real cost — AVIF encoding is meaningfully more computationally expensive than WebP or JPEG. It's not something you'll notice as a website visitor (the file is already encoded by the time it reaches you), but if you're converting or generating a lot of images, AVIF's encode step takes noticeably longer than the equivalent WebP or JPEG conversion.
Browser support: no longer the blocker it used to be
AVIF's browser support was the main hesitation for a while after its introduction, but that gap has closed — every major current browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge) supports it now. The bigger practical question today isn't "will it display," but whether your CMS, image pipeline, or hosting setup handles AVIF cleanly end to end.
So should you switch?
- New, high-traffic photo-heavy pages — worth it. The file-size savings compound at scale, and encode time is a one-time cost, not a per-visitor one.
- Low-traffic or rarely-updated pages — the marginal page-speed benefit is smaller relative to the effort of converting everything.
- Anywhere you're already using WebP and it's working fine — not urgent. WebP remains a solid, broadly efficient format; AVIF is an incremental improvement, not a fix for something broken.
Converting to AVIF
- Drop your JPG or PNG into the JPG to AVIF converter.
- Set a quality level. Expect the conversion to take a bit longer than a WebP conversion of the same file — that's the tradeoff for AVIF's more complex compression, not a bug.
- Download and use the AVIF file on your site, with a fallback format if you need to support unusually old or restricted browser environments.
Working across multiple formats? The general converter handles JPEG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, and AVIF in any direction.
The bottom line
AVIF beats WebP on file size, at the cost of encode time. For a website where every kilobyte affects load time and you're converting images occasionally rather than constantly, that tradeoff is usually worth making.