Compress PDF

Runs in your browser

Reduce PDF file size while preserving quality.

Drop a file here or click to browse

Best for scanned or image-heavy PDFs. Pages are re-rendered, so text becomes part of the image.

This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your data never leaves your device — nothing is uploaded to our servers.

About Compress PDF

Almost all avoidable PDF bloat comes from one place: images embedded at far higher resolution than anything needs. A phone-scanned page can carry a 12-megapixel photo behind text that will only ever be viewed at screen size. Compression here works by downsampling and re-encoding those images while leaving text and vector content untouched, which is why a scanned document may shrink by 80% while a text-only report barely moves — there was nothing to reclaim in the first place.

When to use Compress PDF

Email attachment limits

Most mail servers reject attachments over 20–25 MB. Scanned contracts routinely exceed that and compress well, because the scan resolution is far beyond what the recipient will view.

Government and exam portals

Upload forms frequently impose hard caps such as 2 MB. If you need an exact ceiling rather than 'smaller', use the target-size compressor, which iterates until it lands under your limit.

Slimming a slide deck export

Slides exported to PDF embed full-resolution images for every copy of a background. Compression removes that redundancy without touching your text.

Limitations worth knowing

A text-only or vector-only PDF will barely shrink. There is no redundancy to remove, and a tool promising otherwise is discarding something you wanted.
Compression is lossy for images. Fine print in a low-quality scan can become harder to read.
Already-compressed PDFs (previously optimised, or exported small) yield little further reduction.
The tool cannot compress encrypted files.

How to compress pdf

1
Upload the PDF you want to shrink.
2
Run the compressor and compare the reported output size against the original.
3
Open the result and check any image-heavy pages before relying on it — compression is a quality trade-off by definition.
4
If you need to hit a specific limit such as 2 MB, use the target-size version of this tool instead.

Frequently asked questions

Why did my PDF barely get smaller?+

Because it was probably already efficient. Compression reclaims space from over-sized embedded images. A PDF that is mostly text and vector graphics has very little to reclaim, so a 5–10% reduction is a correct result, not a failure.

Will compression make my text blurry?+

Not for real text. Text and vector content pass through untouched and stay sharp at any zoom. Only embedded images are re-encoded — so a scanned page, which is entirely an image, can lose detail while a typed document will not.

I need the file under an exact size. Can this guarantee that?+

This tool compresses once with sensible settings. For a hard ceiling, use the target-size compressor, which repeatedly adjusts quality until the output lands under the size you specify — the right choice for portals that reject anything over a stated limit.

Compress PDF to an exact size

Need to hit a strict upload limit for an exam, government or admission form? Use a target-size compressor that reduces your PDF to a specific size automatically: