Compress PDF
Reduce PDF file size by re-optimizing the document structure. Fast, browser-based compression with no file uploads.
🗜️
Click or drag a PDF here
Files are processed locally — never uploaded
Your files are never uploaded. All processing happens in your browser.
How to Use
- 1
Upload your PDF
Click to upload the PDF file you want to compress.
- 2
Choose compression level
Select low, medium, or high compression based on your needs.
- 3
Download
Click Compress PDF to download the smaller file.
How It Works
This tool reduces PDF file size by re-optimizing the document's internal structure, entirely within your browser — useful when a PDF is too large to email or upload but you still need to preserve its visual content.
What compression actually changes
The tool re-optimizes the PDF's internal structure (removing redundant data and inefficient encoding) without stripping or degrading the visible content — so text and images are preserved as they were, while the file itself becomes more efficiently packed.
Why results vary by content type
Text-heavy PDFs are typically already fairly compact and see moderate size reduction, while PDFs with large embedded images (especially uncompressed or high-resolution scans) tend to see more significant reductions, since image data usually accounts for most of a PDF's file size.
Examples
Shrinking a scanned document for email
A 25MB scanned PDF that exceeds a typical 20-25MB email attachment limit can often be compressed enough to fit, since scanned image data usually has the most room for optimization.
Reducing size for a web upload portal
Compressing a PDF before uploading to a government or application portal with a strict file-size cap (e.g. 5MB).
Common Use Cases
- Shrinking a PDF to fit an email attachment size limit
- Meeting a file-size cap for an online submission or upload portal
- Reducing storage space for archived documents
Tips
- If a PDF is already mostly text with few or no embedded images, don't expect dramatic size reduction — there's less redundant data to remove in the first place.
- For image-heavy PDFs where you need more aggressive size reduction, consider compressing the source images individually (see the Compress Image tool) before assembling them into the PDF, since that gives more direct control over image quality vs. size tradeoffs.
Frequently Asked Questions
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