Compress a PDF to make it smaller
Shrink a large PDF so it fits an email or upload limit. Choose how much quality you want to keep.
Free · No signup · No watermark · Files never leave your browser
Drop your PDF here
or click to browse — the file is compressed on your device, never uploaded
How to compress pdf in 4 steps
- 1
Open your PDF
Drop the file onto the box. Its current size is shown so you know what you are trying to beat.
- 2
Choose how hard to squeeze
Lossless keeps the document exactly as it is and saves whatever it can. The stronger levels redraw each page as an image, which shrinks scans dramatically.
- 3
Compress
Pages are processed one at a time on your own device. A progress bar shows how far along it is.
- 4
Check the saving, then download
The before and after sizes are shown side by side. If the result is not smaller, the tool says so and offers you the original instead.
Why PDFs get big
Almost all of the weight in a large PDF comes from pictures. A page of text is a few kilobytes; a scan of that same page at a high resolution can be several megabytes. Twenty scanned pages and a phone camera will produce a file that no mail server wants, while a two hundred page report typed in a word processor stays comfortably small.
What compression can and cannot do
Compression is not one operation. Rewriting a file more compactly is safe but usually modest. Redrawing pages at a lower resolution is dramatic but permanent, and it turns a document into a stack of pictures. Any tool promising a huge reduction with no downside is doing the second thing and not telling you.
When to do something else instead
If a file is large because it contains a hundred high resolution photographs and the recipient only needs to read the text, exporting the relevant pages is a better answer than crushing all of them. If it is large because it is genuinely long, a shared link beats an attachment. And if it needs to stay searchable, stop at the lossless option.
Compress PDF — frequently asked questions
Are my files uploaded to a server?+
No. Compression runs inside your browser, so the document never leaves your device. That is unusual for a compressor — most free ones upload your file, process it on their machine and email you nothing about what happened to the copy.
Why did my PDF barely get smaller?+
Because it was already efficient. A PDF that is mostly text is small to begin with, and there is very little left to remove. Big PDFs are almost always big because of scanned pages or high resolution photographs, and those are the ones that shrink.
What is the difference between lossless and the other levels?+
Lossless rewrites the file structure more compactly and changes nothing you can see — text stays selectable and images stay untouched, but the saving is often small. The other levels redraw every page as a JPEG image, which cuts the size hard and permanently converts the page into a picture.
Will I lose selectable text?+
With lossless, no. With Light, Recommended or Strong, yes — every page becomes an image, so the text can no longer be selected, copied, searched or read aloud by a screen reader, and links and form fields stop working. Keep the original file.
How do I make a PDF small enough to email?+
Try lossless first, since it costs you nothing. If the file is a scan and still too big, use Recommended, which usually brings a large scan well under the typical 10 or 25 MB attachment limit. If it is a text document that is still too large, the size is probably coming from embedded fonts or attachments rather than anything compression can fix — a shared link is the better answer.
Can I compress a password protected PDF?+
Only if the password has been removed first. A PDF that needs a password to open cannot be read by the browser, so remove the protection in the app that created it and then come back.
Other free PDF tools
Merge PDF
Combine two or more PDFs into a single document. Drag to reorder, then download — all in your browser.
Split PDF
Break one PDF into several documents — by page range, or one file per page.
Rotate PDF
Turn sideways or upside-down pages the right way up and save the fix permanently.
Delete PDF Pages
Remove the pages you do not need and download the trimmed document.