Compress PDF for free
Shrink PDFs full of photos, scans and reports so they fit through email, chat apps or upload forms with a size limit. The text stays selectable.
Your PDF never leaves your device: everything happens in your browser, with no upload, no sign-up, no watermark and no metadata.
Drop your PDF here
or click to choose · the file never leaves your device
This PDF is protected. It can only be compressed by turning its pages into images, and the new file will have no password.
Original · page 1
Compressed · page 1
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See all PDF tools →How PDF compression works
Everything happens in your browser: the PDF is never sent to a server, not even for a moment. That matters because the PDFs people compress are usually personal — contracts, bills, medical results, scanned IDs. Once the page has loaded, compression even works offline.
With the recommended setting the text is left untouched. What makes a PDF heavy is almost always the photos inside it: a phone photo pasted into a report still carries its full 4,000 pixels, even when it’s printed small. Each photo is scaled down to a size that still looks sharp on screen and on paper, then saved again as JPEG. The text stays selectable and searchable.
Light, recommended or strong decides how much the photos shrink. For scanned PDFs, or when the file must fit an upload limit no matter what, tick the option to turn pages into images: it’s the biggest reduction, but the text stops being selectable.
Password-protected PDFs work too: you type the password here and it stays in your browser. Because the file has to be rebuilt, the compressed PDF comes out without a password.
A text-only PDF is already small. In that case there’s little to gain, and the tool tells you so instead of handing back an identical file. Page 1 is shown before and after, so you can check the quality before downloading. Need the pages as images? Use PDF to JPG.
A real example, made with the tool
A 4-page report with a 12 MP phone photo weighed 3.6 MB. With light compression it came out at 401 KB; recommended, 137 KB; strong, 61 KB — and in all three the text stayed selectable. The photo is what weighs: it was 4000 pixels wide even though it appears small on the page.
Questions about compressing PDFs
Which level should I choose?
Recommended for almost everything: email, messaging apps or forms. Light when the PDF will be printed with large photos. Strong when it has to fit a small limit.
My scanned PDF barely shrank. Why?
A scanned PDF is one photo per page. Tick the option to turn pages into images: it’s the biggest reduction, but the text is no longer selectable.
Is the text still searchable?
At the normal levels, yes: only the photos inside are reduced. It only becomes an image if you tick that option.
How do I get the PDF under 2 MB or 5 MB?
Start with recommended and check the size on screen. If it’s still over, try strong; for scans, the pages-as-images option.
Pages are read with PDF.js (Mozilla, Apache-2.0 licence) and the PDF is rewritten with pdf-lib (Andrew Dillon, MIT licence), inside your browser.