Compress PDF
Pick a quality level and we'll compress the PDF in your browser. Great for email attachments and upload size limits.
Drag & drop or click to select
.PDF · processed in your browser
PrivateQuick answer
How much smaller will my PDF get?
Scanned and image-heavy PDFs often shrink by 60–90% with the Balanced preset. Text-only PDFs that came out of Word are usually already optimized — expect 10–30% savings there. The compressed result and the percent saved are shown right after processing.
About this tool
Compress PDF Online
For when Gmail rejects your 32MB attachment or a job portal caps uploads at 1MB.
Compress PDF rebuilds your PDF with smaller embedded images and a tighter object structure. You get a much smaller file that still looks fine on screen and in print. Three quality presets let you trade size for sharpness.
When you'd reach for this
- Gmail says your attachment is too large to send.
- A government form caps PDF uploads at 1MB or 500KB.
- A client portal rejects scanned PDFs over 5MB.
- You're moving a folder of PDFs to a USB drive or older laptop.
How it works
- 1
Upload the PDF
Drop the file you want to shrink — preview loads in seconds.
- 2
Pick a quality level
Maximum (smallest), Balanced (best for most cases), or High Quality (lightest compression).
- 3
Compress and download
We rebuild the PDF in your browser and download the smaller version.
Why people use it
Real size cuts, not metadata trims
We recompress embedded images, the biggest reason PDFs are huge.
Three presets, no guesswork
Pick by goal: email-ready, balanced, or near-original quality.
Local processing
Sensitive contracts and scans never leave your browser.
Real situations it fits
Email-ready attachments
Trim a 25MB scan down to a couple of MB so it actually sends.
Forms and applications
Hit a 1MB or 2MB upload cap without breaking the form.
Sharing on slow networks
Cut size before sending PDFs over weak Wi-Fi or mobile data.
Best practices
- Pick Medium first — it solves 90% of email-attachment problems without visible quality loss.
- For resume or portfolio PDFs going through ATS portals, target 1MB and check that text is still selectable afterwards.
- If the file is mostly scanned images, Strong compression gives much bigger savings than on text-only PDFs.
- Compress once. Re-compressing an already-compressed PDF gives diminishing returns and visible artifacts.
Common mistakes to avoid
- !Using Strong on a contract or invoice and ending up with blurry signatures or stamps.
- !Expecting compression to fix a 100MB file that's huge because it has 400 photo pages — split first, then compress each chunk.
- !Compressing before merging multiple files. Merge first, then compress the final once — fonts dedupe better that way.