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Compress PDF

Reduce PDF file size while maintaining the highest visual and text quality.

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Step-by-Step Guide

How to use Compress PDF

1

Upload your PDF

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Click to browse or drag your PDF into the upload area.

2

Select a compression level

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Choose Extreme for maximum size reduction, Recommended for a balance of size and quality, or Light for minimal quality impact.

3

Start compression

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Click "Compress PDF". Each page is rasterised and re-encoded as a JPEG stream — the browser stays responsive throughout.

4

Review the result

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See the original size, compressed size, and percentage saved on the result screen.

5

Download the compressed PDF

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Click Download to save the smaller file.

Best Practices

Pro Tips

Tip 1

The Extreme preset is best for scanned documents or image-heavy PDFs. It will significantly reduce text sharpness in text-only PDFs.

Tip 2

Use Recommended for most documents — it delivers 60–80% size reduction with acceptable visual quality.

Tip 3

Use Light for documents where text legibility must be pristine, such as legal contracts or technical drawings.

Tip 4

Purely vector or text PDFs may see little reduction, as JPEG encoding only benefits rasterised content.

Tip 5

For very large documents (50+ pages), compression may take 30–90 seconds — the progress bar reflects real per-page progress.

Common Questions

Frequently Asked Questions

It depends heavily on the content. Scanned PDFs and image-heavy documents typically see 70–98% reduction. Text-only vector PDFs may see 5–20% reduction at best, as PDF text is already highly compact.

The current canvas-based compression converts pages to JPEG images, so text selection and search are not preserved in the output. If searchable text is essential, use the Light preset or try the OCR tool afterwards to regenerate a text layer.

At Recommended quality (0.65 JPEG), printed output is acceptable for most purposes. At Extreme (0.45), visible JPEG artefacts may appear in fine details. Use Light for print-quality output.

No. Remove the password first using the Remove Password tool, then compress.

If the source PDF contains only vector graphics and text (no raster images), converting pages to JPEG can produce a larger file than the original compact vector representation. In this case, PDFolio automatically falls back to structural optimisation.

Yes. The entire compression pipeline — page rendering, JPEG encoding, PDF assembly — runs in your browser using pdfjs-dist and pdf-lib. No data is sent to any server.