ICO to WebP converter
Convert ICO images to WEBP format
WebP keeps the one thing that matters most about an icon, its transparency, and it will not wreck the edges the way JPEG does. What it will not do here is stay lossless, since a browser canvas exposes only the lossy WebP path. At icon dimensions the byte savings that make WebP attractive for photographs mostly evaporate. This pair earns its place when you are standardising a mixed folder of site assets on WebP, not when you want the smallest or sharpest possible icon.
Key facts about ICO to WebP converter
| Encoding mode | Lossy VP8 with alpha. The lossless WebP variant, which would suit flat icon artwork perfectly, is not reachable from canvas.toBlob. |
|---|---|
| Transparency | Kept. WebP stores alpha in a separate ALPH chunk, so a 32-bit icon entry or a one-bit mask both give a transparent background. |
| Quality control | A slider from 30 to 100 in steps of 5, starting at 90, sent straight to the encoder with an estimated size beside it. |
| Edge behaviour | Better than JPEG, worse than PNG. VP8 subsamples chroma, so saturated icon colours fringe along hard boundaries below about quality 80. |
| Size at icon dimensions | A 32x32 icon usually gives 300 bytes to 1 KB. RIFF container overhead is a meaningful share of that, so the win over PNG is small or absent. |
| Source entry | One image only. A multi-size container is decoded by the browser into a single picture, with no control over which entry that is. |
| Scaling | The resize presets shrink but never enlarge, so a 16-pixel icon cannot be turned into a 64-pixel WebP here. |
| Opens the result | Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Opera, Safari from 14, Windows 10 onward, macOS Big Sur onward, plus GIMP and Affinity. |
What happens to your file
This runs entirely in your browser with no network involvement. The icon is exposed through an object URL, decoded by the icon parser built into the browser, and drawn into a canvas belonging to this tab. Asking that canvas for image/webp calls the browser's own encoder on your machine. There is no upload request in the conversion path and no back end behind this page to receive one.
About this tool
- 1
Add your icons
Drop up to twenty .ico files onto the target area, or click it to open the picker.
- 2
Check what was decoded
The preview shows the entry your browser chose, over a checkerboard so you can see the transparency that will be preserved.
- 3
Keep quality high
At icon sizes the file is tiny regardless, so leave the slider at 90 or push it to 100.
- 4
Convert and save
Press Convert, then download the WebP or take converted-webp-files.zip, assembled locally for multi-file runs.
| Input and output | Takes .ico only (image/x-icon) and returns .webp with the image/webp type; any other extension is refused before decoding. |
|---|---|
| Conversion path | ICO to WEBP runs in three steps: an <img> element decodes the icon and the browser picks one entry from a multi-size file; the pixels land on a 2D canvas in this tab; then canvas.toBlob with the image/webp type returns the finished file. |
| Browser support | The icon side decodes in Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari, while writing the WebP works in Chromium browsers and Firefox, and where the type is unsupported the canvas specification makes the browser return PNG bytes under the .webp name. |
| Controls for this pair | A 30 to 100 quality slider (steps of five, default 90) drives the WEBP encode, max-dimension presets from 3840 down to 200 px resize the ICO first, and the strip-metadata toggle is moot on this pair. |
| Batch, caps and naming | Twenty ICO files per run at 500 MB each; one result downloads as a single WEBP, several as converted-webp-files.zip, zipped by JSZip 3.10 in page memory. |
| Device ceiling | The canvas caps it: past roughly 16,384 px a side Chromium refuses the bitmap and iPhone Safari gives up sooner, so an oversized ICO fails before any WEBP bytes exist. |
- Compare the output against a PNG of the same icon; at these dimensions PNG is lossless and frequently smaller.
- Keep the original .ico if Windows or a favicon route references it, because WebP cannot take over those jobs.
- Standardising a site asset folder on one format is the real reason to use this pair, not chasing kilobytes.
- Quality below 80 shows colour fringing on the hard outlines icon artwork is made of, so treat 80 as the floor.
- Alpha channel carried through to WebP
- Adjustable quality with an output estimate
- Single-entry decode from icon containers
- Twenty-icon batches bundled without a server
- Normalising a mixed folder of site graphics onto one delivery format.
- Putting an application icon into a web build whose asset pipeline standardises on WebP.
- Producing a small transparent image of an icon for a documentation page or component library.
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