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Compress PDF files in your browser

Two modes. Preserve keeps selectable text, links, and form fields intact. Aggressive rasterises pages for maximum size reduction on scans.

Processing mode: Local Browser-local

  • No file leaves your browser
  • Mode: Browser-local
  • 250+ files processed in the last 24h
Mode
Compression

Mode: Preserve — selectable text, links, and form fields will be kept.

Waiting for PDFs.

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Related tools

Merge PDF Files Combine multiple PDFs into one clean document in the order you choose. Split PDF Split a PDF into individual pages or extract custom page ranges. Convert PDF to JPG or PNG Render PDF pages as sharp PNG or JPEG images and download them individually or as a ZIP.

How to use it

Compress PDF Online Free

  1. Upload one or more PDF files.
  2. Pick **Preserve** (default — keeps text, links, bookmarks, and form fields) or **Aggressive** (rasterises pages, biggest size reduction on scans).
  3. Choose a quality preset and download. Aggressive output cannot be made selectable again, so keep your original if you might need to edit later.

Good for

Common use cases

Use Preserve for everyday PDFs — invoices, reports, contracts, and e-books — where selectable text, links, and form fields need to survive. Use Aggressive for scans, photo PDFs, and image-heavy attachments where smaller output matters more than text fidelity.

Processing mode

Browser-local

Files are processed by your browser. They never reach our servers.

Questions

Compress PDF Online Free FAQ

Does this keep text selectable?

Yes, in Preserve mode — selectable text, links, bookmarks, and form fields stay intact. Aggressive mode rasterises every page to a JPEG, which removes selectable text, links, bookmarks, and form fields. The Aggressive radio shows an inline warning before you commit to it.

Why didn't my PDF get smaller?

Text-heavy PDFs are usually already well compressed by their authoring tool, so Preserve mode's image re-encoding may have nothing to optimise. The result panel will tell you when this happens. Switching to Aggressive will shrink the file further by re-rendering pages as images, but you lose selectable text — only worth it for scans and photo PDFs.

Can I compress more than one PDF?

Yes. This tool supports multiple PDFs in one run.

Is there a file size limit?

You're limited only by what your browser can hold in memory. Most laptops handle PDFs up to a few hundred MB without issue; very large scans may need to be split first using the Split PDF tool.

Are my files uploaded anywhere?

No. Compression runs entirely in your browser using pdf-lib. Your file never leaves your device, which is why the tool works on flaky connections and keeps confidential documents private.

Will this tool stay free?

The basic workflow is designed to stay free. Paid upgrades later will focus on bigger limits, batch work, OCR, saved presets, and ad-free use.