100% free tool
Compress PDF
Make a PDF smaller - keep the text sharp, or redraw pages as images for a much bigger saving.
- No sign-up required
- Instant results
- Nothing is uploaded
or drop them here
Makes a PDF smaller, and tells you honestly what each route costs. Keeping text as text re-saves the file more compactly and is always safe, but on an already tidy file it saves little. Redrawing the pages as images shrinks a scan dramatically, at the price of text that can no longer be selected, searched or read by a screen reader. Both run in your browser, and the before and after sizes are shown so you can decide whether the trade was worth it.
Frequently asked questions
Common questions about the compress pdf.
Why did the safe option barely shrink my file?+
Because there was nothing wasteful left to remove. Most PDFs are already compressed by whatever produced them; the saving comes from repacking a verbosely written file, not from squeezing the content. If you need a much smaller file, the image route is the one that delivers it.
Which should I use for a scanned document?+
The image route. A scan is already pictures, so nothing is lost by re-encoding them, and dropping the quality to around 65% with a lower DPI usually cuts the size by most of it.
Can I get the text back after using the image route?+
Not from that file - the words became pixels. Keep the original, or run the result through an OCR tool to recover a text layer.
More Images & PDF tools
Image Compressor & ConverterCompress and convert JPG, PNG and WebP images without leaving your browser.Background RemoverRemove the background from product photos, logos and headshots in your browser - batch of 20, download as a ZIP.JPG to PDF ConverterCombine images into a single PDF - reorder pages, pick A4 or Letter.Merge PDFCombine several PDFs into one file, reordering them first.