Made Good Designs

PDF Compressor

This free PDF compressor shrinks image-heavy PDFs — scans, photographed documents, brochures, portfolios — right in your browser. Preview every page, pick Light, Balanced, or Strong compression (or fine-tune the JPEG quality yourself), and download a dramatically smaller file: scanned documents typically come out 70–85% smaller. Nothing is uploaded anywhere — unlike most compressor sites, which hold your document on their servers for an hour or more, your PDF never leaves your device.

100% private — runs in your browser

Browser-based PDF compression is lossy and cannot beat dedicated server tools on vector text PDFs. For scanned documents and image slides, expect meaningful size reductions without uploading anywhere.

How to compress a PDF

  1. Drop your PDF onto the upload area — page previews appear so you can see what you’re working with.
  2. Pick a preset: Light (gentlest, biggest files), Balanced (the default sweet spot), or Strong (smallest files, softer detail). You can also fine-tune the JPEG quality directly.
  3. Click Compress & download. The tool rebuilds each page and reports exactly how much smaller the file got.

Typical results on scans and image-heavy documents: a 10 MB scanned contract lands around 1.5–3 MB, comfortably under most email attachment and upload limits.

How it works — and what it’s best at

The tool re-renders each page and re-encodes it with efficient JPEG compression, which is where the huge savings on scans come from: scanner software often stores pages as bloated, barely-compressed images. Because pages are re-rendered, this approach is built for image-based PDFs — scans, photos, image-heavy decks — and honest about the trade-offs:

Your PDFResult
Scanned documents, photographed pagesExcellent — typically 70–85% smaller
Image-heavy decks, brochures, portfoliosVery good — large reductions with little visible change
Text-only PDFs (exported from Word, etc.)Poor fit — these are already tiny, and rasterizing can grow them; the tool warns you if that happens

One honest caveat most compressor sites bury: because pages become images, text in the output is no longer selectable or searchable. For scans that were never searchable anyway, nothing is lost — and if you need the text, run the scan through our Image to Text (OCR) tool.

Why compress a PDF?

  • Email limits — most providers cap attachments at 20–25 MB; scanned multi-page documents blow past that fast.
  • Upload caps — job portals, government forms, and CMSs often enforce 2–10 MB limits.
  • Storage and speed — smaller archives, faster sending, faster loading.

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Frequently asked questions

Is my PDF uploaded to a server?

No — and this is worth checking on any compressor you use. Most popular tools upload your document and retain it temporarily (commonly “deleted after one hour”). This one runs entirely in your browser: contracts, IDs, and financial documents never leave your device.

Which preset should I choose?

Start with Balanced. If the result is still too large, try Strong; if fine detail matters — small print, technical drawings — use Light. You can re-run with a different preset in seconds since there’s no upload round-trip.

Will the text still be selectable?

No — pages are re-encoded as images, so any selectable text layer is flattened. That’s irrelevant for scans (they had no text layer to begin with) but it’s why text-first PDFs are a poor fit for this method. If you need searchable text from a scan, use OCR alongside.

How much smaller will my PDF get?

For scanned and image-heavy PDFs, expect roughly 60–85% smaller on Balanced and more on Strong — a 10 MB scan typically lands between 1.5 and 3 MB. The exact figure depends on how inefficiently the original was saved; scanner output usually compresses dramatically. The tool reports the precise before/after size on every run.

Is there a file size or page limit?

No hard limits, no daily quota, no watermark, no signup. Processing happens on your device, so very large documents simply take a bit longer — a progress bar keeps you posted.

Why did my PDF get bigger?

Your PDF was probably text-based and already efficient — rasterizing its pages into images costs more than the original vector text did. The tool tells you when this happens instead of silently handing you a worse file. Text PDFs usually don’t need compression at all.

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