Compress PDF - Shrink PDF File Size Online Free

Often yes, but it depends on the content. Pick the Low preset (lowest DPI and JPEG quality) for the smallest result, and check the before/after size shown in the result panel. Scanned or image-heavy PDFs compress dramatically and usually drop under 100-200KB; text-heavy or multi-page PDFs may not, because each page is rendered to an image. There is no fixed byte-target slider, so reduce the page count or split the PDF first if you need to hit a strict government upload limit.

No. There is no daily task limit (unlike free tiers that cap you at a couple of tasks), no account to create and no watermark added to the file. Your PDF is uploaded over HTTPS to our server for compression and automatically deleted afterward — we never store, share, or sell it.

Drop a PDF, pick a compression level (Low / Medium / High / Best — High is recommended) and click Compress PDF. Each page is re-rendered at the chosen DPI and JPEG quality, then assembled into a new smaller PDF. Most PDFs shrink 50-90% with no visible quality loss at the High preset.

Low (96 DPI, 40% JPEG) is best for very large image-PDFs where size matters more than fine detail. Medium (110 DPI) suits text-heavy reports for screen reading. High (130 DPI) is the sweet spot for most workflows — print-friendly and email-friendly. Best (150 DPI) keeps high-resolution photography intact at the cost of file size.

At High and Best presets text remains crisp and easily readable. Low and Medium are designed for documents that are mostly images — text-heavy pages compressed at Low may show some softening but stay legible. If text quality is paramount, choose the Best preset or skip compression for that file.

It usually isn't — compression here works by rasterising each page to JPEG, which means text becomes a picture of text. If you need both small size and selectable text, run a smaller, OCR-aware compression in a desktop tool, or skip this step entirely and compress only the images inside the PDF.

Highly variable: image-heavy PDFs (scanned documents, magazines, brochures) often shrink 80-95% at the High preset. Text-only PDFs may not shrink at all (or may grow slightly) because the source already used efficient text encoding. The before/after size comparison in the result panel tells you exactly.

Your PDF is uploaded over an encrypted (HTTPS) connection, compressed on our secure server with Ghostscript, and automatically deleted afterward — we never store, share, or sell it. If your policy requires a file that never leaves your device, use a desktop tool like Ghostscript or qpdf locally instead.

Not in a single batch from this screen — currently one PDF at a time so you can verify quality per file. For bulk compression, run each through the tool one after another; settings are remembered between runs.

Yes — free, unlimited use, no watermark on the output. Companies typically pay tens of dollars a month for desktop tools that do this; we provide it free as part of the PDF toolkit.

Drop your PDF onto the page, choose one of the four compression levels, then click Compress PDF — the optimised file downloads in seconds with no account, no install and no watermark. The result panel shows the before and after size so you can confirm the saving, and you can switch to a different level if you want a smaller file.

This tool shrinks a PDF by tidying its internal structure, so PDFs whose bulk is large embedded photos see only a modest reduction. The fix is to compress the images first: run them through our Compress Image tool, then rebuild or re-export the PDF so the lighter pictures go in from the start.

These are the standard Ghostscript compression profiles: Screen re-encodes images at 96 DPI and 40% JPEG quality for the smallest possible file (good for on-screen viewing only), E-book steps up to 110 DPI, Printer (the recommended default) uses 130 DPI and 75% quality for documents you'll still print, and Prepress keeps 150 DPI and 88% quality for near-original image fidelity.

No. The tool always runs a structural cleanup pass alongside the image re-encoding, compares both results, and returns whichever is smaller — it never hands you back a file larger than your original, even if the source PDF was already lightly compressed.

For emailing a scanned document, use Screen or E-book — 96-110 DPI is plenty for the recipient to read on-screen and keeps the attachment small enough for most inbox size limits. For a file heading to a print shop or press, use Printer or Prepress so photos and fine text stay sharp at real-world print resolution.

Your PDF is uploaded to our servers, where Ghostscript re-renders and re-encodes each page at your chosen preset (Screen, E-book, Printer or Prepress) before the smaller file is sent back to you — compression does not happen locally in your browser. The uploaded original and the processed file are both auto-deleted from the server after processing, so nothing is retained beyond what's needed to produce your download.