Compress PDF
Compress PDF renders each page to a JPEG at a reduced scale and rebuilds the document from those images. That is very effective on scans and image-heavy files, and it has one important consequence: text becomes part of the page picture, so it is no longer selectable or searchable. Everything happens locally in your browser.
Add your PDF
The file is read by your browser and stays on your device — there is no upload step.
Your PDF
The work runs in this tab. Nothing is sent anywhere, and the download is generated locally.
Output —Load a PDF
How to use Compress PDF
- 01Upload
Add your PDF
Drop the file in; its size and page count are shown.
- 02Customize
Pick a level
Choose Light, Recommended or Strong depending on how much you want to shrink it.
- 03Process
Compress
Export to rebuild the PDF at a smaller size and see the savings.
Why is your PDF large?
PDFs are containers. Almost always the size is one specific thing inside, and which one decides how much you can win.
- Scanned pagesbiggest wins
A scan is a photograph of a page. These files are dominated by image data and often shrink dramatically — sometimes by 80% or more.
- Photos in a reportgood wins
Embedded images at full camera resolution, displayed at a fraction of that size. Re-encoding them to their displayed size is where the saving comes from.
- Text and vectors onlylittle to gain
A PDF exported from a word processor is mostly text instructions and fonts, which are already compact. Expect a small saving and do not be surprised by it.
What changes, and what does not
The images inside the document are re-encoded at a lower quality. On a scan that is the whole page, so heavy compression shows as softness in the lettering.
Page count, page size, and real text. Text in a digitally-created PDF is instructions rather than pixels, so it stays perfectly sharp no matter how hard the images are compressed.
What you are trading
- Image quality
The only meaningful lever in a PDF compressor. It applies to every embedded image, so a document mixing a logo and a photograph gets one setting for both.
- Searchability
Compressing does not remove a text layer. If your scan was never OCR'd it had no searchable text to begin with — that is a property of the scan, not of compressing it.
When compression is not the answer
- You only need some of the pagesExtract Pages
- Some pages should not be there at allDelete Pages
- It should be several smaller documentsSplit PDF
- You need the images, not the documentPDF to JPG
Supported formats
- Maximum file size —
- bounded by your device's memory
- Processed by —
- pdf-lib, on your device
Your file, and what the page does
Your file is never uploaded. Compress PDF reads it into this browser tab and processes it with pdf-lib on your own device. There is no upload endpoint in the application and no copy on any server — closing the tab discards it.
What the page does send or fetch
- Ads on the page
- The site is funded by advertising, so the page loads Google AdSense. That carries the usual web basics — IP address, browser, referring page — as on any ad-supported site.
- An anonymous usage counter
- When Compress PDF finishes we record that the tool ran, whether it succeeded and how long it took. No file data, no identifier, no cookie.
Your file is not on that list. How this works.
Frequently asked questions
Text-only PDFs have little to compress. The biggest savings come from documents full of photos or scans.
This method rasterises pages to downsample images, so selectable text becomes part of the page image.
No. Each page is rendered to an image and the document is rebuilt from those, so text becomes part of the picture. Keep the original if anyone needs to search, copy from or edit the document.
Yes — Compress PDF is completely free. There's no account, sign-up, watermark or limit.
No. It runs in any modern browser — Chrome, Edge, Safari, Firefox, Brave — with nothing to download or install.
Not sure compressing is what you need?
- Too large for an email limitCompress PDF
- Only some pages are neededExtract Pages
- Should be several documentsSplit PDF
- Pages are the wrong way roundRotate PDF
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