PDF Compressor

Shrink PDF File Size in Your Browser

The PDF Compressor reduces a PDF's file size so it is easier to email, upload, or store — and it offers two very different strategies depending on what your document contains. Everything runs locally in your browser: your PDF is never uploaded to a server, which makes the tool safe for contracts, statements, and other confidential documents.

Strong mode re-renders every page and re-encodes it as an optimized JPEG at the resolution and quality you choose. This is what commercial PDF compressors do under the hood, and it is dramatically effective on scanned documents and image-heavy files — reductions of 60–90% are common. Lossless mode re-saves the document with object streams enabled, packing the internal structure more efficiently without touching images or text at all.

Which mode should you choose?

Use Strong mode when the file is a scan, a photo-heavy report, or anything where the size clearly comes from images. Note its one trade-off: because pages are re-encoded as images, text in the output is no longer selectable or searchable. The Balanced preset (110 DPI) reads crisply on screen; choose High quality (150 DPI) if the document will be printed, or Maximum compression (72 DPI) when smallest size matters most.

Use Lossless mode when you must keep text selectable — for example a text-based contract that is just over an attachment limit. Savings are smaller and depend on how inefficiently the original file was saved, but nothing about the document's quality changes.

How to Compress a PDF

Choose a mode (and, for Strong mode, a quality preset), then drag your PDF onto the drop zone or click to browse. You will see the original size, the new size, and the percentage saved, then you can download the compressed copy. The download is named with a "compressed_" prefix so you never overwrite your original by accident. If the result is barely smaller in Lossless mode, the file was already efficiently saved — try Strong mode instead.