Compress PDF online, free and without uploading your file

Shrink a heavy PDF without installing anything or handing over your documents

Almost everyone hits the same wall eventually: you try to attach a PDF to an email and it exceeds the size limit, or a government portal only accepts files under 2 MB and yours is 8. Compressing is the obvious fix, but most online tools ask you to upload the document to their server — and that isn't always acceptable for a contract, an ID, a bank statement or a medical file.

This tool solves it differently: compression happens entirely inside your browser. Your PDF never travels over the internet and no copy is kept anywhere.

What the compression actually does

A PDF is usually heavy for one of two reasons. By far the most common is that it contains large images: pages photographed with a phone, high-resolution scans, or screenshots inserted without optimisation. The other, much rarer, is a huge amount of text with embedded fonts.

This tool tackles the first case, which covers the vast majority of everyday documents. Each page is redrawn at a controlled resolution and stored as an optimised image inside the new PDF. The result keeps the same page count, the same paper size and the same visual appearance, at a fraction of the weight.

There is an honest trade-off worth knowing before you use it: the text stops being selectable. Once it becomes part of an image it can't be copied, searched with Ctrl+F, or read by a screen reader. For a scanned document that changes nothing, because it was already an image. But if your PDF came out of Word and needs to stay searchable, compressing is not what you want.

The three levels

Light reduces the file while keeping good sharpness. It's the default and the sensible choice for most cases. Medium balances both: quality drops noticeably when you zoom in, but the document stays perfectly readable on screen and in print. Maximum prioritises size above all — use it when the upload limit is strict and legibility is the only goal.

After compressing you always see the original size, the new size and the percentage saved. If the PDF doesn't shrink because it was already optimised, we tell you rather than dressing a worse file up as an improvement.

If even maximum can't get you under the limit, the document probably just has too many pages — in that case split the PDF and send it in parts. And if you need the opposite, there's Merge PDF.