How Direto Notícias made its images up to 70% lighter with WebP
Published on September 04, 2026
A news site lives on images — and every heavy photo is a reader kept waiting. Direto Notícias solved it by converting its photos from JPG to WebP with a free AtlasDocs tool, right in the browser: images came out up to 70% smaller, pages started loading faster and not a single photo left the newsroom's computer. Here's what was done and how to repeat it on your own site.
The problem: good photos, slow pages
On a news site almost every story comes with a photo — and almost every photo arrives from the camera or the wire service as a JPG, far heavier than the screen actually needs. Added up, those images are what slows a page down the most, especially on phones and weak connections. A reader who waits too long closes the tab; and Google measures that slowness when deciding who shows up first.
What Direto Notícias did
Direto Notícias, a news portal from Espírito Santo, Brazil, started converting its photos from JPG to WebP before publishing, using the AtlasDocs image conversion tool. The flow is simple: the team uploads the day's photos, picks WebP as the output format, downloads the converted files and posts them on the site. Nothing is installed and nothing is sent to a third-party server — the conversion happens in the newsroom's own browser.
- Images up to 70% smaller than the original JPG, looking the same on screen.
- Lighter pages and faster loading for the audience, especially on mobile.
- Zero change to the routine: photos keep coming in the same way, just as WebP.
- Privacy preserved: the photos never leave the computer during conversion.
Why WebP weighs so much less than JPG
WebP is an image format Google created for the web. It stores the same photo with smarter compression: according to Google itself, a WebP image is usually 25% to 34% smaller than a JPG of equivalent quality — and on photos that arrived far too heavy from the source, the savings can be much bigger, like the up-to-70% the portal measured. Every modern browser opens WebP, so readers notice no difference other than speed.
How to convert JPG to WebP on AtlasDocs
- Open the image format converter and upload your JPG photos — you can upload several at once.
- Choose WebP as the output format.
- Click Convert and download, then use the WebP files on your site in place of the JPGs.
If a photo is still large after converting, run it through the image compressor too: it trims the weight without losing much quality and never produces a file bigger than the original.
Compress image (JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF) →Tips for a faster news site
- Convert in batches: upload every photo for the story at once and download them all ready.
- Convert before publishing — swapping images later is more work than converting on the way in.
- Keep the original JPG in a separate archive in case you need to re-edit the photo later.
- Measure before and after: compare file sizes and the load time of a photo-heavy article.
The JPG-to-WebP conversion happens entirely in your browser: your photos stay on your own device and are never uploaded to any server — which is exactly what let the portal adopt the workflow without changing anything about newsroom security.