WebP to PNG: Get a Lossless Copy You Can Edit

Two situations send people here. Either something refuses the file, an old CMS, a design tool from a few versions back, a listing uploader with a hardcoded allow list. Or you're going to keep working on the image and you don't want another round of lossy compression baked in every time you save.

They're different problems, and only one of them has a setting you need to get right.

Why PNG and not JPG

If you're picking a universally accepted format, PNG and JPG are the two candidates. The difference that decides it is transparency.

WebP can store transparent pixels. So can PNG. JPG cannot, at all, which means a cutout product shot or a logo with a see-through background comes out of a WebP to JPG conversion sitting on a solid rectangle. PNG carries the alpha channel across untouched.

PNG is also lossless, which is the whole point if you're planning to edit. Every save of a JPG or a lossy WebP shaves a little more detail off. PNG saves are free in that sense: the tenth save is identical to the first.

How to convert WebP to PNG

1. Open the Image Converter.
2. Drop your .webp files in.
3. Set the output format to PNG.
4. Now the important part, below.
5. Convert and download, one file at a time or the whole batch as a ZIP.

Set quality to 100 if you want a true copy

Here's the detail worth knowing. PNG output runs through color quantization by default, which is a compression technique that reduces the image to a limited palette. At the default quality of 80, that palette is roughly 205 colors. On flat graphics and logos it's invisible and it makes the file dramatically smaller, which is usually exactly what you want.

It is not a faithful copy, though. On a photograph with smooth gradients you may see faint banding in a sky or a soft shadow.

Push the quality slider to 100 and quantization is skipped entirely. You get a full color PNG holding every pixel the WebP decoded to. Bigger file, exact copy. If your reason for converting is "I need a master to edit", set it to 100 and don't think about it again.

PNG does not restore what WebP threw away

This one catches people out. If the WebP was saved with lossy compression, and most WebP files on the web are, detail was already discarded before you touched it. PNG stores what remains perfectly. It cannot invent what's missing.

So you end up with a file that's often three to five times larger than the WebP while looking exactly the same. That's not a bug, it's what lossless storage of an already lossy image costs. The value is that from this point forward nothing degrades further.

If the WebP was saved losslessly, which is common for screenshots and exported UI graphics, the conversion is genuinely pixel perfect in both directions.

When to do something else instead

If the destination only needs to display a photograph and transparency isn't in play, JPG will be several times smaller than the PNG and nobody will see the difference. Use PNG when transparency matters or when you're going to edit.

If you just want a smaller file rather than a more compatible one, converting to PNG is the wrong direction entirely. WebP is already the more efficient format. Run the WebP through the Image Compressor and keep it as WebP.

And before converting anything, try the upload. A lot of "it won't take WebP" assumptions date from years ago. WordPress has accepted WebP since version 5.8, Photoshop has read it natively since 2022, and every current browser displays it.