Compress PDF
Shrink large PDF files by re-rendering each page as an optimized, size-efficient image.
Upload a PDF file
Drag & drop files here, or
Files are processed securely in your browser
How It Works
- 1Upload the PDF you want to shrink.
- 2Choose a compression level.
- 3Click Compress PDF.
- 4Download the smaller file and compare the size reduction.
Features
- Three compression presets from light to aggressive
- Works well on scanned and image-heavy PDFs
- Shows the before/after file size instantly
Privacy
This tool runs entirely in your browser using WebAssembly and Canvas — your PDF is never uploaded to a server.
About Compress PDF
PDFs already use lossless compression internally for their content streams, so a file that's mostly vector text is usually close to as small as it's going to get without changing what's on the page. Most of the size in a large PDF comes from embedded images — high-resolution scans, photos, or screenshots saved at full quality — and that's where real savings come from. This tool gets there by rendering each page to an image at your chosen quality level and re-encoding it, which shrinks oversized or high-resolution embedded images significantly.
That approach makes it especially effective on scanned documents, photo-heavy reports, or PDFs exported at unnecessarily high resolution. A 40-page scanned contract at 600 DPI, for instance, can often shrink to a fraction of its original size at Recommended quality with no visible difference on screen.
The tradeoff is that every page becomes a raster image regardless of what it originally contained, so a PDF built from clean vector text and no images may not shrink much — and could even grow slightly — while losing the ability to select or search its text. If preserving selectable text matters more than file size, this isn't the right tool for a text-only document.