Compress PDF
Shrink a PDF that's too big for an email attachment or upload form.
Click to upload or drag and drop
One PDF file
Compressing…
🔒 Your document is processed entirely on your device and never leaves your browser.
✅ Done!
Reduce PDF file size for email and uploads
A PDF that is too large will bounce from email, fail to upload to a government portal, or eat up storage. This free PDF compressor shrinks documents — especially scanned files and PDFs full of photos — so they fit under common limits such as 1MB, 2MB, 5MB or 10MB, directly in your browser.
How the compression works
Scanned PDFs are essentially pictures of pages. The tool re-renders each page as an optimized image at the resolution and quality you select, then rebuilds the document. Larger savings come from a lower quality setting; choose "Low" when readability matters most and "High" when you need the smallest file possible.
How to compress a PDF
- Upload your PDF.
- Choose Low, Medium or High compression.
- Press Compress PDF and compare the before and after sizes.
- Download the smaller file. If it is still too large, try a stronger level.
Good to know
- Because pages are rasterized, text in the compressed PDF is no longer selectable. This is ideal for scanned documents; for text-based PDFs you may prefer to keep the original.
- To reduce size further, first split the PDF and send only the pages you need.
- Have loose photos? Turn them into one PDF with JPG to PDF after compressing them with the image compressor.
Your document never leaves your device — no upload, no account, no watermark.
FAQ
How does PDF compression work here?
Each page is re-rendered as an optimized JPEG image at a chosen resolution/quality and rebuilt into a new PDF. This works best for scanned or image-heavy PDFs.
Will text stay selectable?
This method rasterizes pages, so text becomes part of the image and is no longer selectable/searchable. If you need to keep selectable text, only compress scanned documents with this tool.