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Compress PDF — Free

Shrink your PDF file size for email attachments, upload limits, and storage — without any software install. 100% browser-based.

✓ 3 Compression Levels✓ No Signup✓ No Watermark✓ Private — No Upload
STEP 1

Upload a PDF to Compress

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Drag & Drop a PDF here

Select one PDF file

Low CompressionBest quality
RecommendedBalanced
High CompressionSmallest file
🔒 100% private. Your PDF is compressed directly in your browser — no server upload. Files never leave your device.
💡 This works by re-rendering each page as a recompressed image, which gives the biggest size reduction on scanned documents and image-heavy PDFs. Text-based PDFs that are already small may not shrink much further, and text will no longer be selectable in the output.

✅ Compressed

How to Compress a PDF Without Losing Too Much Quality

Scanned documents and PDFs full of photos are often 10–50MB — far above the limits most email providers and application portals allow. Compressing a PDF re-encodes the pages at a lower resolution and image quality, shrinking the file dramatically while keeping it fully readable.

Common Reasons to Compress a PDF

Email attachment limits — most providers cap attachments at 25MB; large scanned PDFs often exceed that alone.
Application & government portals — many forms cap uploads at 1–5MB.
Storage & sharing — smaller PDFs upload faster and take up less space in the cloud.

How It Works

1
Upload PDF — one file at a time.
2
Pick a level — balance size vs. quality.
3
Download — compressed PDF, ready to send.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Is my PDF uploaded to a server?

No. Compression happens entirely in your browser. Your PDF file never leaves your device.

Will the text in my PDF still be selectable after compressing?

No — this tool re-renders each page as an image to achieve maximum size reduction, so text becomes part of the image and is no longer selectable or searchable. If you need to keep selectable text, only compress PDFs where that isn't required (e.g. scanned documents, which usually aren't selectable to begin with).

Which compression level should I choose?

"Recommended" works well for most scanned documents and photo-heavy PDFs. Use "High Compression" if you need to hit a strict size limit, or "Low Compression" if visual quality matters most.

Why didn't my PDF get much smaller?

If your PDF is mostly text with few or no images, it's likely already small and efficiently encoded — this tool's biggest gains are on scanned pages and image-heavy documents.