This is a conversion between two modern formats, which makes it the most situational one on this site. WebP is already good. AVIF is better on photographs and worse on some other things. Unlike converting from JPEG or PNG, the answer here is genuinely "check the number before you commit".
Where AVIF wins
On photographic content, AVIF beats WebP by roughly 20–30% at matched visual quality. The gap widens on large images, images with lots of smooth gradient, and images with fine noise-like texture. If your pages are dominated by big hero photographs and product shots, converting the WebP library to AVIF is a real, measurable win.
Where WebP holds its own
- Small images. AVIF carries a few hundred bytes of container overhead, so for icons and thumbnails under a few kilobytes the AVIF can come out larger.
- Flat graphics and text. WebP has a dedicated lossless mode that is extremely good at large single-colour areas and sharp edges; AVIF has no equivalent advantage there.
- Decode speed. AVIF is slower to decode than WebP, which matters on low-end phones rendering many images at once.
- Encode speed. WebP encodes in milliseconds; AVIF takes seconds. If you are processing thousands of images, that difference compounds.
You are stacking two lossy passes
Unless your WebP is lossless, it has already discarded detail, and AVIF will now compress the result — preserving the WebP artifacts faithfully and sometimes spending bytes to do so. If you still have the original PNG or camera file, converting from that instead will give you a smaller and cleaner AVIF than routing through WebP. Use this tool when the WebP is what you have, not when it is a step you chose.
Practicalities
The first conversion downloads a 3.5 MB WebAssembly encoder, because no browser can create AVIF itself. It is cached afterwards. Encoding then takes several seconds per image. Transparency carries across intact — both formats support a full alpha channel — and animated WebP converts to its first frame only, since animation is not handled by this path.
Deployment advice
Do not replace your WebP files with AVIF; add them. Serving both inside a <picture> element lets each browser take the best format it supports, and gives you a safe path back if AVIF turns out to be slower to decode on the devices your visitors actually use. Measure on a real mid-range phone rather than a desktop before rolling it out everywhere.
Encoding runs in a background thread on your own machine. No image is transmitted at any point.