Compress PDF
Shrink heavy PDFs so they fit email attachments and upload limits.
Done
How to compress a PDF
- Drop one PDF onto the box above, or click it to browse.
- Choose a Compression level. Balanced is selected by default; Light renders pages at a higher resolution and squeezes them less, Strong does the opposite for the smallest file.
- Press Compress PDF. The progress bar counts through the pages as each one is redrawn.
- The result downloads as your filename with -compressed added, and the status line reports the before and after sizes with the percentage saved.
What people use it for
Almost always because something refuses to go through: an attachment limit, an upload form, or a portal with a stubborn maximum size.
- Getting a scanned contract under the size cap of a government or bank upload form.
- Emailing a photo-heavy site report or inspection record that started out at tens of megabytes.
- Slimming a scanned passport or ID copy before attaching it to a booking or application.
- Reducing a scanned set of receipts before filing them with an expense claim.
- Making a brochure light enough to sit on a website without a slow download.
Good to know
The important limitation first: this tool works by drawing each page onto a canvas and saving that picture as a JPEG inside a new PDF. Page dimensions are preserved and the document still looks like the original, but everything on the page becomes part of an image. Text is no longer selectable, no longer searchable, no longer readable by a screen reader, and links, bookmarks and form fields do not survive. For scans and image-heavy documents that is a fine trade, since they were pictures already. For a text document, a contract you expect someone to search, or anything that must stay accessible, this is the wrong tool.
Results also vary a lot by document. A PDF that is already well optimised — plain text exported from a word processor, or a file another tool has compressed — can come out no smaller, or even slightly larger. When that happens the page says so plainly and still offers you the file, so you can try the Strong level or simply keep your original. Long documents take real time and processing power because every page is rendered; rendering does continue if you switch to another tab.
None of this involves a server. Page rendering, JPEG encoding and PDF rebuilding all happen with your browser's own graphics and file machinery, so a confidential scan stays on the machine it started on — no upload step, no copy sitting in someone's queue, unlike the usual online compressor.
Questions people ask
Which level should I pick?
Start with Balanced and open the result. If the text looks soft where it matters, redo it on Light; if you are still over an upload limit, redo it on Strong. Re-running always starts from the file you dropped in, so nothing is lost by experimenting.
Can I get the selectable text back afterwards?
Not from the compressed file — the original text is gone once the page is an image. Keep your original, and if you need the words out of a scan, Image to Text can read them back with OCR.
My file came out larger. What went wrong?
Nothing broke. It means the original was already stored more efficiently than a page-sized JPEG, which is common for text-only documents. Try Strong, or accept that this particular PDF is about as small as it usefully gets.
Is there a size limit on the PDF I can compress?
There is no fixed limit, but the whole file is held in memory while it is processed. Very large documents are best handled on a desktop; on a phone, consider using Split PDF first and compressing the parts.