Compress PDF Online
Reduce your PDF's file size with light, balanced, or strong optimization — processed locally, with honest before-and-after results.
Click to select or drag and drop a PDF file
Select one PDF file to optimize.
How to Use This Tool
Select a single PDF file, choose an optimization level — Light, Balanced, or Strong — and click "Optimize PDF." The tool shows your original file size next to the new size, the exact amount saved (or a clear note if nothing was saved), and gives you a download button for the result.
How It Works
Light re-saves the PDF using compact internal object streams. Balanced does the same and also strips metadata fields like title, author, and producer. Strong rebuilds a brand-new PDF by copying only the actual page content and resources from the original, which drops unused or orphaned data that a simple re-save can't remove. This tool does not re-encode or recompress embedded images, so files that are already mostly compressed images may not shrink much at any level.
Why This PDF Tool Is Useful
Smaller PDFs are easier to email (many providers cap attachment size), faster to upload to portals or forms, and quicker to share over slow connections — situations students, job applicants, and small-business owners run into constantly. Because this tool reports your actual before-and-after size rather than a promised percentage, you can see honestly whether optimization helped for your specific file.
Best Practices
Try Balanced first — it's a safe default that removes unnecessary metadata without restructuring the document. Reach for Strong if a PDF has accumulated bloat (for example, from many edits in other software) and Balanced didn't help much. If a file barely shrinks at all, it's likely already efficiently structured or dominated by image data this tool doesn't re-encode.
Frequently Asked Questions
Will this always make my PDF smaller?
No — and this tool will tell you honestly if a file didn't shrink. Some PDFs are already efficiently structured, and this tool doesn't recompress embedded images, so gains vary by file.
Does compressing reduce image or text quality?
No. This tool only restructures the PDF file itself — it does not rasterize pages or recompress images, so visual quality is unchanged.
What's the difference between the three levels?
Light only re-saves the file structure. Balanced also removes metadata. Strong rebuilds the document from scratch using only the page content, which can remove more leftover data at the cost of slightly more processing time.
Can I compress a password-protected PDF?
No — encrypted or password-protected PDFs can't be opened by this browser-based tool.