Compress PDF file
Start compressing your PDFs to 100kb, 200kb, or 1mb sizes instantly into smaller sizes. Reduce PDF file sizes without losing quality for easy sharing, emailing, and storage. No watermarks, no signup just upload your file and our compressor will automatically optimize it within seconds.
Your file is processed inside this browser tab. Nothing is uploaded to a server.
How to compress pdf file
- 1
Upload your PDF
Drop the file onto the box. Its current size is shown straight away.
- 2
Pick a compression level
Light keeps print quality, balanced suits email and the web, strong gives the smallest file with some visible softening of photos.
- 3
Compress and download
Click Compress PDF. You'll see the before and after sizes, then download the result.
About the Compress PDF tool
A PDF is almost never large because of its text — a hundred pages of writing is a few hundred kilobytes. It is large because of its pictures, which is why this tool concentrates on them: each embedded image is decoded, scaled down and re-encoded at a lower quality, while the text is left completely alone so it stays sharp and selectable at any zoom.
That is a different approach from tools that flatten each page into a picture. Those get small files by destroying the document: the text stops being text, search stops working, and printing looks worse. Here the structure of the file survives intact.
Frequently asked questions
How much smaller will my file get?+
It depends entirely on what's inside. Scanned documents and photo-heavy brochures often shrink by half or more. A file that is nearly all text is already efficient and may barely change — if compression wouldn't help, you're told so and given the original back rather than a pointlessly re-saved copy.
Will the text get blurry?+
No. Text in a PDF is drawn from font outlines, not pixels, and it is never touched here. Only the embedded images are re-encoded.
Can I compress a file that's already been compressed?+
You can, but there's usually little left to gain, and each pass re-encodes the images again, which costs quality. Compress from the original whenever you can.
Why were some images skipped?+
Some image formats inside a PDF — CMYK JPEGs, JPEG 2000, fax-encoded scans, indexed palettes — can't be decoded and re-encoded reliably in a browser. Rather than risk corrupting them, those are left exactly as they were.
Are transparency and image masks preserved?+
Yes. Transparency is stored separately from the image data in a PDF, so it keeps working after the picture itself is re-encoded.