Quick Guides 2 min read · April 13, 2026 · Updated August 14, 2026

What Should I Use in 2026: WebP, AVIF, or JPEG XL?

For most web projects in 2026, use AVIF as your primary format and WebP as your fallback. AVIF now sits at 95%+ global browser support and delivers 20–50% smaller files than WebP at comparable quality. JPEG XL remains at roughly 15% browser support - limit it to archival and non-web pipelines for now.

Published April 2026 by the Mochify Engineering Team. This guide reflects browser support data and format recommendations current as of April 2026, based on caniuse.com tracking.

A reliable <picture> element covers all three in a sensible order:

HTML picture element

<picture>
  <source srcset="image.avif" type="image/avif">
  <source srcset="image.webp" type="image/webp">
  <img src="image.jpg" alt="...">
</picture>

2026 browser support at a glance

Format	Global support 2026	vs JPEG file size savings	Best for
WebP	96–97%	25–35% smaller	Broad compatibility fallback
AVIF	~95%	20–50% smaller than WebP	Primary web delivery
JPEG XL	~15%	35–60% potential	Archival, print, native apps

Sources: caniuse.com/avif, caniuse.com/jpeg-xl

Why JPEG XL is not ready yet

Google rekindled browser support efforts for JPEG XL in early 2026, but it remains behind flags in Chrome and Firefox. Can I Use tracks updates actively, and the picture is improving, but no team shipping production web assets should depend on it today. AVIF and WebP cover 95%+ of real-world users without any conditional logic.

AVIF vs WebP: the trade-off that matters

AVIF delivers superior quality at low bitrates - it is the right choice for hero images, product photography, and any asset where visual fidelity matters. WebP encodes faster and has wider legacy support, which makes it the right fallback in the <picture> stack rather than a primary target. For the vast majority of web workflows in 2026, the pattern above handles both automatically.

Product photography is the one case where the answer can be "neither, manually". On a hosted storefront the CDN already negotiates the format per browser, so converting by hand duplicates work the platform does for you. For that decision, see the product-image version of this question.

Serving AVIF is the right call for the web - but compatibility questions still come up once a file leaves your site, like when someone downloads an image and needs to open it in a tool that doesn't support AVIF yet. For those cases, see our AVIF to JPG conversion guide.

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