Convert GIF to WebP
Animated GIF is a 1987 format doing a job nobody designed it for, and it does that job about four times more expensively than it needs to. WebP holds the same animation with real compression behind it, and every browser has displayed it for years.
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Add to Chrome — freeDrop your GIF file here, or click to browse
Up to 50 MB. Deleted automatically after 30 minutes.
What it does
- Every frame and every frame delay carried across
- Typically three to five times smaller than the GIF
- Full color, instead of GIF's 256-color ceiling
- No watermark and no sign-up
How to use GIF to WebP
- 1
Add the GIF
Animated or still. Animations keep all their frames and their timing; a single-frame GIF simply becomes a single-frame WebP.
- 2
Convert
Each frame is decoded and the sequence is re-encoded as animated WebP on our server. Long animations take a moment, since every frame is real work.
- 3
Put it on the page
Use it in an ordinary image tag, exactly where the GIF was. It animates by itself with no player, no autoplay policy and no muted attribute to remember.
How it works
Every frame is decoded along with its delay, and the sequence is re-encoded as a single animated WebP.
The frame timings are carried across rather than regenerated, which is the detail that decides whether a loop feels the same afterwards. An animation re-encoded at a uniform frame rate plays subtly wrong when the original held certain frames longer than others, and hand-made loops do that constantly.
Why GIF is so expensive
The format predates almost everything about how animation is compressed today.
It has no idea about time. Each frame is compressed on its own. A twenty-four frame loop of a mostly static scene stores that scene twenty-four times, where a modern format stores it once and then describes what moved.
Its compression is from the 1980s. LZW works well on flat, repetitive graphics and poorly on photographic content, which is most of what people animate now.
It only has 256 colors per frame. So a GIF made from video footage has already been degraded — dithered and banded — and it is still several times larger than the WebP of the same clip.
None of that was a mistake. GIF was built for small flat graphics on dial-up connections, and it was good at that.
What to check afterwards
The loop count. GIFs are usually set to loop forever, and that intent carries over, but a GIF built to play once will also play once as a WebP. If a loop stops unexpectedly, that setting came from the source.
Transparency at the edges. GIF transparency is one bit — a pixel is either invisible or solid. WebP supports partial transparency, but it cannot invent soft edges that were never in the file, so a GIF with jagged cut-outs keeps them.
Very long animations. A GIF with hundreds of frames is a video. It will convert, and the result will still be a large file, because the problem is the running time rather than the format.
Where the original still earns its place
Keep the GIF if the destination is a system with a fixed format whitelist — certain email clients, older forum software, some messaging apps. Those are the remaining cases, and they are the reason the format refuses to die.
For anything you control, the WebP is the same animation at a fraction of the cost, and the conversion takes one step.
Examples
A screen recording turned into a loop
Measured on a real file, not estimated. Three and a half times smaller with the frame delays preserved, so the loop plays at the same speed. On a page carrying several of these, that difference is most of the page weight.
A small reaction loop
The saving holds at small sizes because the mechanism is not resolution. GIF compresses each frame against a 256-color palette with a scheme from the 1980s; WebP predicts frames from the ones before them, which is where most of the redundancy in an animation actually lives.
Frequently asked questions
Does the animation survive?
Yes — every frame and every inter-frame delay. This is worth stating because plenty of converters silently return the first frame as a still image, which looks like a broken file rather than a deliberate limitation. If you convert a ten-frame GIF here you get a ten-frame WebP that loops the same way.
Will it play everywhere the GIF played?
In browsers, yes — Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge have all supported animated WebP for years. Outside browsers is patchier: some chat clients, older email software and a few social platforms still accept only GIF, and those are the places to keep the original. The web itself is not the problem.
Why is WebP so much smaller?
Because it compresses across frames rather than treating each one separately. An animation usually changes a little between frames, so WebP stores the difference instead of a whole new picture. GIF also caps every frame at 256 colors, so a GIF has already thrown away color information and is still larger.
Should I use AVIF or a video instead?
For a genuine video clip, an MP4 or WebM will beat both — that is what video codecs are for, and a long GIF is nearly always a video wearing the wrong extension. WebP wins when you want something that behaves like an image: no player, no controls, works in an image tag, loops without being asked.
Further reading
- Half the Width and a Third of the Frames Took 60% Off the GIFThere are exactly three things that make a GIF smaller, and two of them are visible to the viewer. Knowing which one to spend first — and how much each is actually worth — saves a lot of guessing at a file that will not fit.
- The Same Clip Was Four Times Bigger as a GIF, at Fewer FramesConverting a video to a GIF feels like a downgrade, so the file should get smaller. It gets much bigger. The clip we measured quadrupled while losing four frames in every ten, and the reason is that a GIF has no idea what a video codec knows.
- GIF Transparency Has Exactly One Bit, and It Shows on Every EdgeA PNG can record a pixel as 37% transparent. A GIF cannot — each pixel is either fully visible or fully invisible, and there is nothing in between. On a shape with a soft anti-aliased edge, that difference is measurable, and it is why a logo saved as GIF gets a jagged fringe that no amount of care in the original file prevents.