Compress PDF
Shrink a PDF's file size with an adjustable quality slider — ideal for scanned documents.
A PDF that's too large to email, too slow to upload to a form with a size limit, or just bulkier than it needs to be is a common frustration, especially with scanned documents where every page is effectively a full-resolution photograph.
This tool compresses a PDF by rendering each page and re-encoding it at your chosen quality level, then rebuilding a new, smaller PDF from the results — you control the tradeoff between file size and visual quality with a single slider. This approach works especially well for scanned or image-heavy PDFs, where most of the file size comes from embedded images rather than text.
Because every page is rendered as an image during compression, text in the output is no longer selectable or searchable — this is an important tradeoff to understand: this tool is best suited for scanned documents (which typically have no selectable text to begin with) rather than text-native PDFs where you want to preserve searchability. For a text-native PDF, the size savings from this method may not be worth losing text selection.
How to use Compress PDF
- 1
Upload your PDF
Drop the PDF you want to shrink into the upload area.
- 2
Adjust the quality slider
Lower quality produces a smaller file; higher quality preserves more visual detail.
- 3
Click Compress & Download
See the before/after file size and download your compressed PDF.
Features
- Adjustable quality slider to control the size/quality tradeoff
- Shows exact before-and-after file size comparison
- Especially effective for scanned or image-heavy PDFs
- Processed entirely client-side — no file upload
Frequently asked questions
Common mistakes to avoid
- Using this on a text-native PDF (like a Word-exported document) where preserving selectable text matters more than file size savings.
- Setting quality too low, resulting in blurry or hard-to-read text and images.
- Expecting compression to work as well on already-compressed, non-scanned PDFs as it does on scanned documents.
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