Compress PDF

How to use Compress PDF

1. Open Compress PDF — no sign-up or software download is required.
2. Drag and drop your file(s) into the tool, or click to browse and select them from your device.
3. Choose any options you need, such as order, quality, page range or output format.
4. Click the action button and let the tool process everything locally in your browser.
5. Download the finished file. Your originals are never changed or uploaded.

Why use Compress PDF?

• 100% free with no limits, no sign-up and no watermarks.
• Private by design — your files are processed in your browser and never uploaded to a server.
• Fast and lightweight, with instant results even on a phone or a slow connection.
• Works everywhere — any modern browser on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android or iOS.
• Part of a full pdf tools suite, so related compress pdf tasks are one click away.

What people use Compress PDF for

• Getting a PDF under an email attachment limit — commonly 25 MB for Gmail and Outlook, and 10 MB for many corporate mail servers.
• Meeting an upload cap on a government or university portal, which is often 2 MB or 5 MB per document.
• Shrinking a scanned document where every page is a full-resolution photograph of paper.
• Reducing a picture-heavy report or portfolio before sharing it over a slow connection.

Compress PDF: limits and things worth knowing

• Compression works by re-encoding the images inside the PDF. A scanned document — where every page is an image — can drop 60-80%. A text-only PDF that contains no images may barely change, because there is nothing to re-encode.
• Four levels are offered and the resulting size is shown before you download, so you can step down one level at a time rather than guessing.
• Text remains text at every level. Compression never rasterises your document, so it stays searchable and selectable.
• If your PDF is large despite having little content, the cause is usually embedded fonts or a scanned background rather than resolution — try Maximum, and consider whether the pages needed to be scanned at all.
• Compression is lossy for images and cannot be undone from the output file. Keep the original until you have checked the result.

Is it private and secure?

Your privacy is built in. Compress PDF does all processing on your own device using client-side code, so your files are never transmitted, stored or seen by anyone — including us.

Network activity: none. Nothing is sent and nothing is fetched. This tool makes no network request at all once the page has loaded — which is why it keeps working if your connection drops.

You do not have to take that on trust — our privacy proof page publishes the Content-Security-Policy that enforces it, lists every third party it permits, and shows how to verify the whole claim yourself.

We also measured the competition. Our PDF upload audit recorded how many bytes each of 20 online PDF tools actually transmits: 12 of the 13 measurable services uploaded the whole test file, and Filevane transmitted 0.00 MB.

Learn more

How to Compress a PDF Without Losing Quality — How to compress a PDF without losing quality: why files get large, which method to use for scans vs text, and how to hit a target size. Nothing uploaded.