Compress PDF - Shrink PDF File Size in Your Browser

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.

Yes — every page is rendered to canvas and re-encoded entirely in your browser. The PDF never touches a server, making the tool safe for confidential business documents, legal exhibits and protected health information.

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.