Compress PDF
Shrink a PDF's file size, right in your browser — see a preview of your file, pick the compression level and quality that fits what you need, then download.
Drop a PDF here, or click to browse
How compressing a PDF works
Compressing a PDF reduces its file size, usually by re-encoding the images inside it more efficiently, so the same document takes up less storage space and uploads or attaches faster. A PDF's size mostly comes down to those embedded images — scanned pages, photos, or high-resolution graphics take up far more space than the text around them. This tool offers two honest ways to shrink that: light compression, which re-saves the file more efficiently while keeping every page exactly as it was, and strong compression, which re-renders each page as a JPEG image and rebuilds the PDF from those images.
Light compression is the safer default — it typically saves a modest amount of space and never changes what's inside the document, so text stays selectable and searchable. Strong compression can shrink a scanned PDF dramatically, sometimes by more than half, but the tradeoff is real: once a page is flattened into an image, you can no longer select, search, or copy its text. This tool tells you that plainly before you run it, rather than calling it "lossless" when it isn't. When you pick strong compression, you also get three quality presets — Smallest file, Balanced, and Best quality — so you control how much sharpness you're trading away instead of getting a single fixed result. Before you run either mode, you'll see a thumbnail of your file's first page along with its page count, so you know exactly what you're about to compress.
Common use cases
- Getting a scanned document under an email attachment size limit
- Shrinking a photo-heavy report before uploading it to a portal with a size cap
- Reducing storage space for archived PDFs you don't need to search
- Preparing a lighter file for a slow connection or a mobile data plan
- Fitting a large scanned form or contract under a government or job-portal upload limit
Whichever level and preset you choose, the before-and-after file size is shown right after compression, so you know exactly what you're getting before you download. Everything runs on your own device — your PDF is never uploaded to a server, so it works just as well on a phone or tablet as it does on desktop.
Related tools
Compress PDF — frequently asked questions
Light compression doesn't touch quality — it just re-saves the file more efficiently, with every page identical to the original. Strong compression converts each page to an image, so there's a real quality tradeoff; the Smallest file, Balanced, and Best quality presets let you choose how much sharpness you're trading for file size.
They control how much each page is scaled down and how aggressively it's re-encoded as JPEG before download. Smallest file gives the biggest size cut but looks softer if you zoom in; Balanced (the recommended default) is a strong cut that still reads clearly on screen; Best quality shrinks the file less but keeps pages sharp enough to zoom into or print.
There's no fixed cap from the tool. In practice it depends on your device's memory, since compression runs entirely in your browser rather than on a server.
Yes — no sign-up, no daily limit, no watermark on the compressed file.
With light compression, yes. With strong compression, no — pages become flattened images, which is clearly labeled before you run it.
Because it trades away searchable/selectable text for a smaller file. That's the right choice for scanned documents, but not for text-heavy PDFs you still need to search or copy from.
The tool checks for this as soon as you upload and stops with a clear message rather than producing a broken file — you'll need to remove the password with the Unlock PDF tool first, then compress the unlocked file here.
Yes, for strong compression on longer PDFs — a Cancel button appears while it's running, and cancelling just returns you to your settings without losing your uploaded file.