Ranking the best Image Formats

A tier-list ranking of web image formats from worst to best. BMP and GIF land in D tier due to large file sizes and limitations. PNG and JPEG sit in C tier as legacy standards with decent compatibility but inferior compression. WebP earns A tier for combining transparency, animation support, and significantly better compression than JPEG. SVG also gets A tier for vector-based scalability and animation potential. AVIF takes the S tier as the modern gold standard, offering 20-30% better compression than WebP plus HDR and wide color gamut support, with ~96% browser support making it a practical default choice with WebP as fallback.