How to compress a PDF without losing quality

2026-06-19

A 20 MB PDF won't fit in most email inboxes, and slow uploads are no fun. The good news: you can usually shrink a PDF by 50–90% with no visible quality loss — and you can do it entirely in your browser, without sending your document to anyone.

What makes a PDF big?

Almost always, it's images. Scanned documents and PDFs full of photos carry high-resolution bitmaps that are far larger than they need to be on screen. Text and vector graphics are already tiny. So the fastest win is re-compressing the images inside the file.

Compress it in your browser

Open the Compress PDF tool, drop your file, pick a compression level, and download the smaller version. Nothing is uploaded — the file is processed locally on your device, which is faster and private.

• Light — keeps near-original quality; good for text-heavy PDFs.
• Balanced — the sweet spot for most documents.
• Strong — smallest files; ideal for emailing scans.

Other ways to shrink a PDF

If your PDF only needs a few pages, removing the rest helps a lot — use Split PDF or Delete PDF Pages. Merging many files? Merge PDF first, then compress once at the end.

Tips

• Compress after you've finished editing, not before.
• For pure-text PDFs, expect smaller savings — they're already efficient.
• Keep the original; compression is lossy for images.