PNG vs JPG: Which Image Format is Better For Your Site?

Web designs and visuals are key for seeking the viewer’s attention. The users throughout their entire session time find better engagement with websites having quality and informative photos. 

Images have the power to give an attractive touch to your website. They help convey your website services and story, drawing visitors’ attention, creating better connections, and consequently, improving web traffic. Images make websites more compelling and contribute to the overall beauty of a website.

But, choosing the right type of image format to speed up your website often remains sceptical. Although there are dozens of image formats available, today we are going to talk about JPEG and PNG and what image format is best suitable for web pages.

For choosing between different image file types, probably your main concerns are clear image and fast loading speed. So, now, let’s first get an overview of JPG and PNG and their features.

Overview of JPG

JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group and is one of the most popular file formats used by websites. It was developed in 1992. Since JPEG file formats are lossy, they make large-sized images into small sizes and make them easy to load on websites. However, as the term “lossy” suggests that image resulted in quality reduction after compression.

Although this key feature of lossy compression in JPEG format is permanent, they are ideal to use for the web. Apart from this, JPEG is also helpful to contrast complex and vibrant colors of photographs in smaller sizes. It contains 16 million-plus different colors. In other words, JPEG lets you use large colorful pictures after compression.

So, if you are using an eCommerce website, JPEG image file format can be your best option. It will allow your website to load faster after making images lighter. As a result, it will reduce the overall loading time of the website but you won’t be able to get the same quality of the images.

So, if you have a large file, you can compress it down to turn it into a lighter JPG to achieve a goal of faster load time.

 

Features of JPG image format

 

• • smaller in size

• • fast loading speed

• • Lower image quality than PNG

• • Does not support transparency

• • Supported with a wide range of CMS platforms

• • Better for web pages with lots of images

 

Overview of PNG

PNG (pronounced as ‘ping’) stands for Portable Network Graphics and their compression is lossless. That means, your images will remain the same quality when they are compressed. However, using PNG for high-resolution photos means sacrificing your website loading time. 

PNG type of image format is best recommended for storing files with fewer colors like logos, illustrations, and screenshots. For photos, they are not an ideal option to go with as they consist of large files.

The PNG format allows crystal clear images with a quality display of letters, dark and light backgrounds, and sharp lines. PNG file type also provides a transparency feature which makes it a good choice for creating logos.

 

Features of PNGs image format

 

• • supports transparency

• • large file sizes

• • slow loading time

• • higher image quality

 

PNG vs JPG and What to Choose For Your Website?

After getting an overview of both the file types, we are now going to compare them based on their qualities. This PNG vs JPEG comparison is based on Compression, Size, and Transparency. 

  

Image Compression: JPEG is better than PNG

JPEG and PNG use different compression methods or codecs to store a file’s data.

JPEG works on the DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) compression method. This technique splits an image into parts of different frequencies. As it is known that JPEG uses lossy compression, it eliminates the less important frequencies from an image.

While this method is efficient for large-sized images, there always be a certain loss of data.

Hence, JPEG images are most likely to have a quality drop but remain unnoticed by the viewers.

Whereas the case of PNG works on the no-loss data compression method named LZW (Lempel-Ziv-Welch) compression. As a result, this compression always keeps the quality of PNG images the same. 

PNG provides a near-perfect data representation even after compression, retaining the large size of the image. This makes JPEG image format better than PNG in terms of Compression.

 

Image Sizes of PNG vs JPEG

As we have discussed above, JPEG is a better option for colorful and real-life pictures. JPEG format keeps those photos smaller in size.

Therefore, JPEG has become the best choice for professional photographers.  

However, when color-filled images are allowed to save in PNG format, they may need more space and bandwidth to be saved.

On the other hand, PNG file sizes are suitable for illustrations, logos, screenshots, line art, etc to be saved in smaller size and better quality.

 

Image Background Transparency: PNG is the only option

The PNG image format is designed to support transparency in the images while JPEG doesn’t. This feature of PNG file format lets you overlay images using any background. It fits best over any background.

Most editing programs use a checked background to show the transparency of PNG images. This feature is great for logos.

JPG, on the other hand, does not provide transparent features and only supports non-transparent images.

Conclusion for PNG vs JPG

Identify your requirements and make the right selection. Depending on website purpose, Both the image file formats are better to choose from.

Do you want a fast-loading website? Which image format works best to get a fast website? In that case, we would suggest you go with JPGs for photos and PNGs for logos.