OPTIMIZE · LIVE

Compress PDF

Make a PDF small enough to email or upload, and see exactly how many bytes you saved before you keep the result.

  1. 1Add your PDF.
  2. 2Pick Low, Recommended or Extreme.
  3. 3See how much smaller it got and download.
No account neededFiles deleted within one hour
YOUR TASK

Good things start with a file.

Drop PDFs or images here, or choose from your device.

PDF

Rendering page previews…

Drag a page, or use the arrows
The number in the corner is the page's original position.
Click a page to leave it as it is

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List the page numbers in the order you want them. Pages you leave out are dropped.
Position
Click a spot on the page. The preview on the left follows.
Format
Diagonal, light grey, on every page. The preview on the left shows how it will look.
Pages that already contain text are left untouched.
Sign with your mouse, trackpad or finger.
Page
Position
Click a spot on the page. The preview on the left follows.
Size
A visual signature on the page, not a certificate signature. The signature image travels like your PDF: over a single-use link, and it is deleted with the file within one hour.
Compression
Page size
Quality

Add at least two PDFs to merge.

Continue with this PDF

This tool is still in development. You can arrange files locally; nothing is uploaded until it opens.

Files are uploaded over an encrypted, single-use link, processed on our own servers and deleted within one hour.

Need a different tool?

Three levels, named honestly

Low removes duplicate objects, unused fonts and metadata without touching pixels. Recommended resizes pictures to about 150 DPI with barely visible loss; Extreme goes further for email and upload limits, and we tell you photos soften.

Real numbers, no fake percentages

You see the original size, the new size and the difference. If a file does not shrink, we say so instead of inventing a “saved 40 %”.

Text stays text

No level rasterizes pages. Selectable text, links and bookmarks survive, so the compressed file still behaves like a PDF.

IN DEPTH

Compress PDF: what to expect

Most oversized PDFs are heavy for one of two reasons: embedded images that were never resized, or a file that was assembled from many sources and carries duplicated fonts and objects. The first case is fixed by image compression, the second by structural optimization. Because the fix depends on the cause, we let you pick the mode and show you what each one did.

A scanned contract is essentially a stack of photographs, so image compression makes the biggest difference there. A text-only report exported from Word is usually already small; structural cleanup might shave a few percent at most. Knowing this before you start saves you from expecting a miracle from a file that is already lean.

Email gateways often reject attachments above 10–25 MB, and many portals cap uploads lower. The goal is rarely “as small as possible” but “under the limit while still readable”. Recommended is the right start for almost everything; use Extreme when a portal still says the file is too big.

Questions, answered

Can every PDF get smaller?
No. A PDF that was already optimized, or that contains almost no images, may shrink by only a few kilobytes. We show the real result and never pretend otherwise.
Will compression blur my images?
Low does not change images at all. Recommended keeps about 150 DPI, which looks the same on screen and in normal printing. Extreme keeps about 100 DPI with stronger JPEG compression, so photos soften when zoomed in.
Does it keep links, bookmarks and form fields?
Yes at every level. Pages are not rasterized, so interactive elements and text stay intact.
Is there a file size limit?
Up to 100 MB per file, free and without an account.
What happens to my file afterwards?
Input and output are deleted from our storage within one hour of the job finishing, whether you downloaded the result or not.
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