Compress PDF Online — Free, No Upload
Shrink a PDF to fit an upload limit, right in your browser. Nothing is uploaded — your document never leaves your device.
or drag and drop here — up to 10 files at once
Your files are processed on your device and are never uploaded.
How to compress a PDF online
- 1
Add your PDF
Drag and drop up to 10 PDF files onto the box above, or tap to pick them from your device.
- 2
Choose resolution and quality
96 DPI at 70% quality suits most on-screen documents. Raise the resolution to 150 DPI if the file will be printed.
- 3
Compress and download
Press Compress PDF. Each page is re-rendered and re-encoded on your device, then downloaded as a smaller PDF.
Why use this tool
Files never leave your device
Everything runs inside your browser. Nothing is uploaded, stored or seen by anyone but you.
No signup, no watermark
No account, no email, no branding stamped on your output. Free with no daily limit.
Instant — no upload wait
Because there is no round trip to a server, results appear as fast as your device can work.
Works on your phone
Built mobile-first, so you can do this from a phone browser without installing anything.
What actually makes a PDF large
Most oversized PDFs are large because of images — a scanned document, a deck full of screenshots, or photos dropped in at full camera resolution. Reducing the render resolution and re-encoding those images is where nearly all the savings come from, which is exactly what this tool does.
A PDF that is mostly text, by contrast, is already small and compresses poorly by rasterisation — you would trade selectable text for an image and gain little. If your goal is only to meet an upload limit on a scanned form, this tool is ideal; if it is to slim a text report, the better fix is exporting it correctly from the source application.
Hitting a portal's upload limit
Government portals, exam forms and seller panels routinely cap PDFs at 100 KB, 200 KB or 1 MB. Start at 96 DPI and 70% quality, check the size, and step the resolution down to 72 DPI if you are still over. Because the whole process runs on your device, you can iterate as many times as you like with no upload wait and no daily limit.
Frequently asked questions
- How do I compress a PDF to 100 KB?
- Choose 72 DPI and lower the image quality slider. The result panel shows the exact before-and-after size, so you can adjust until the file drops under your target. Very text-heavy PDFs may not reach a tiny target without becoming hard to read — resolution is the main lever.
- Is my PDF uploaded to a server?
- No. The whole document is processed inside your browser using a Web Worker. It is read into memory on your own device and never transmitted — there is no server to receive it. This matters for contracts, IDs and financial statements, which is most of what people compress.
- Will the text in my PDF stay selectable?
- No — and this is the honest trade-off of client-side compression. Each page is turned into an image, which removes the selectable text layer. That is ideal for scanned documents and image-heavy PDFs (where it shrinks the most), but if you need to keep crisp, selectable text, compress the source instead of a finished PDF.
- Why did my PDF not get smaller?
- If a PDF is already a set of well-compressed images, or is pure vector text, re-rendering it can produce a file that is the same size or larger. When that happens the tool tells you so and you should simply keep the original.
Related tools
Keep going — these pair well with what you just did.