PDF Compressor

Compress PDF Online — Free, Two Real Modes

Shrink a PDF's file size for easier emailing or uploading. Two genuinely different compression approaches are available, depending on whether you need to keep the text selectable or just want the smallest possible file.

How to Compress a PDF

Upload your file and pick a mode. Optimize cleans up the PDF's internal structure while keeping every bit of text fully selectable and searchable — a safe, modest size reduction that works on any document. Maximum compression converts each page into a recompressed image, which produces much smaller files (especially for scanned or image-heavy PDFs) but means the text is no longer selectable afterward. Adjust the quality slider in maximum mode to balance size against sharpness, then click "Compress PDF" — you'll see the exact before-and-after file size and percentage reduction once it's done.

Which Mode Should You Use?

If your PDF is mostly text — a report, a contract, an article — use Optimize. You'll keep full text selection and search, with a real (if modest) size reduction. If your PDF is a scanned document or full of large images and the file size is the main problem, Maximum compression will shrink it far more aggressively, at the cost of no longer being able to select or search the text.

Why "Compress PDF" Tools Vary So Much in Quality

Genuine PDF compression that preserves both quality and text selectability is a hard technical problem — it requires finding and re-encoding embedded images inside the PDF's internal structure without breaking anything else. Many free tools quietly just do a light structural cleanup and call it "compressed" regardless of what you actually need. This tool is upfront about the tradeoff instead of hiding it behind one button that may or may not do much.