Compress PDF files with low, medium, high or maximum compression modes.
Reduce PDF file size with low, medium, high or maximum compression. Designed for scanned documents that need to fit under an upload limit.
It re-renders each page as an optimised image and rebuilds the document around those. That achieves large reductions on scanned material, where the pages were images to begin with.
A PDF is a container, not a compression format — it packages fonts, images and drawing instructions, each stored separately. What makes yours large determines what will actually help.
| Symptom | Likely cause | Best fix |
|---|---|---|
| Huge, no selectable text | Full-resolution page photos | This compressor, or resize the sources |
| Large, text selectable, no images | Fonts embedded without subsetting | Re-export from the source application |
| Large after many edits | Accumulated revision history | Any full rewrite discards it |
| Large but only a few pages needed | Unnecessary pages | Extract or delete pages instead |
That last row is worth emphasising: removing pages is lossless with respect to the pages you keep. If a portal wants two pages of a forty-page transcript, extracting them takes the file from 8 MB to 400 KB with no quality cost at all. Try Extract PDF Pages before compressing.
| Content | Comfortable | Tight but readable |
|---|---|---|
| Scanned text page | 150–300 KB | 80 KB |
| Scanned page with a photo | 300–600 KB | 150 KB |
| Native text page | 20–60 KB | 15 KB |
| Page with charts | 100–250 KB | 60 KB |
Because each page is re-rendered as an image. The characters remain visible but are no longer text objects. For scans this changes nothing; for a document from a word processor, re-export from the original instead.
For a scanned document built from phone photos, typically 70–90%. For a PDF that is already efficiently encoded, very little — there may be nothing left to remove.
No. Page count and page dimensions are unchanged. Only the resolution and encoding of the page content changes.
The content is unchanged, only its encoding. Verify legibility afterwards, particularly of stamps and signatures. Some authorities require an original-quality scan, so check before compressing anything that must be certified.
No. Reliable client-side PDF encryption is not achievable with the libraries this site is built on, and shipping something that looks like protection but is not would be worse than shipping nothing.
No. Compression runs entirely in your browser. The file is read from your disk, processed in the tab, and saved back to your device.