Compress a PDF
Shrink a PDF by rebuilding its internal structure and stripping metadata. You see the exact before and after size — and the file never leaves your browser.
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This compress PDF tool shrinks a file by rebuilding its internal structure and stripping metadata. Drop the file, press one button, and see the exact before-and-after size before you download.
The work runs in your browser — the PDF is never uploaded. Compression here is the honest kind: no server round-trip, no quality settings to guess at, and a clear explanation of what changed.
Why Use This Compress PDF Tool?
- Private — the PDF is compressed in your browser, never uploaded
- See the savings — exact before/after file size is shown for every run
- No quality settings to fiddle with — content is kept as-is
- Free, no signup, no daily limit
- Fast — most documents compress in a couple of seconds
How to Compress a PDF — 3 Steps
- Drop your PDF into the box above.
- Press the blue Compress PDF button and wait a moment while the file is rebuilt.
- Compare the before and after size, then download the smaller file (if the result is not smaller, the tool tells you and offers the original).
What PDF Compression Can and Cannot Do
PDF files carry a lot of baggage besides the pages: editing metadata, duplicate objects left behind by previous tools, unused embedded fonts, un-packed object streams. This compressor re-serializes the document into a clean, cross-referenced structure with object streams and drops document metadata along the way. For a typical text document that has been through Word, a scanner and an e-signature service, this alone often trims 10–30% of the file size with zero visible change.
What it deliberately does not do is re-compress images. Shrink JPEGs inside a 200 MB scan and you get a 15 MB file — but you also get visible artifacts and a smaller ceiling for later OCR or printing. Doing that well needs real image re-encoding with quality choices, which is a different (heavier) tool. So the honest rule of thumb: text-heavy PDFs compress well here; photo-heavy scans shrink less, and the tool will simply tell you when a file is already as small as it gets.
Why run compression locally at all? Two reasons. Privacy — the document is not sent anywhere, which matters for contracts, financial statements and medical records. And speed — there is no upload of a large file before compression even starts; the whole job is limited by your device, not your connection.
If a PDF must get much smaller, compressing is step one. Step two is removing what you do not need: delete unused pages with the Delete Pages tool before compressing, and the two effects multiply. A 60-page report with 20 pages of appendices nobody reads can lose a third of its size just by losing those pages.
Frequently Asked Questions
Text and vector documents typically shrink 10–30%. Photo-heavy scans shrink much less because this tool does not re-compress images. The tool shows you the exact result — if a file cannot get smaller, it says so.
No. Pages, fonts and images are kept exactly as they are — only the file structure is rebuilt and metadata is removed. What you see and print stays identical.
Scans are mostly images, and this tool does not re-compress images (that would lower their quality). It removes structural overhead, which is small in image-heavy files.
No. Compression runs entirely in your browser. The file never leaves your device.
Yes — document properties like author, application and creation history are stripped. This also makes the file cleaner to share.
No. Unlock it first with the Unlock PDF tool, compress the unlocked copy, then protect it again if you need to.