How to Compress a PDF
Using our free PDF compressor is simple: upload your PDF file, choose a compression level, click the Compress PDF button, and download the result. There are three levels — Less compression (high quality), Recommended (the best balance of size and quality), and Extreme (the smallest possible file). Less and Recommended shrink embedded images while keeping your text selectable; Extreme rasterises each page for the maximum reduction.
Because all processing runs in your browser using WebAssembly-powered JavaScript, your document never leaves your device. This makes the tool completely private and safe for confidential documents such as contracts, invoices, and legal files.
Why Compress PDF Files?
- Email attachments: Most email providers have a 10–25 MB attachment limit. Compressing a PDF can bring it within the allowed size.
- Faster sharing: Smaller files upload and download faster, saving time when sharing via WhatsApp, Google Drive, or Dropbox.
- Storage savings: Storing thousands of compressed PDFs on your server or cloud storage costs significantly less than uncompressed originals.
- Website performance: Embedding a smaller PDF in a webpage loads faster for visitors, improving user experience and SEO rankings.
- Submission portals: Government and academic portals often enforce strict file size limits (e.g., 2 MB or 5 MB). Compression helps meet these requirements.
How Much Will the PDF Shrink?
The reduction depends on the PDF content and the level you choose. Image-heavy and scanned PDFs shrink the most, because the tool downsamples and re-encodes the embedded photos at a lower resolution. Pure text or vector PDFs are already compact, so Less and Recommended may only shrink them a little — for a guaranteed smaller file in those cases, choose Extreme, which flattens every page to an image.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this PDF compressor free?
Yes, completely free with no file limits, no sign-up, and no watermarks added to your document.
Is my PDF safe to compress here?
Absolutely. Your PDF is processed entirely in your browser. It is never uploaded to our servers. You can verify this by disconnecting from the internet and still using the tool successfully.
Does compression remove content or text from my PDF?
With the Less and Recommended levels, no — your text, fonts, and layout stay intact and selectable; only embedded images are re-compressed to a smaller size. The Extreme level converts each page to an image for the smallest file, so its output no longer has selectable or searchable text. Choose Recommended if you need the text to stay editable.
Can I compress a password-protected PDF?
Password-encrypted PDFs cannot be processed by this tool. You would need to remove the password protection first using a PDF editor, then compress the file.
Related Tools
If you need to do more with PDF files, try our PDF Merger to combine multiple PDFs into one, our PDF Splitter to extract individual pages, or our Image to PDF converter to create PDFs from photos.