May 1, 2026 · Compress PDF
How To Compress A PDF Without Losing Quality
Email attachment limits are stuck in 2008 - 25 MB on Gmail, 20 MB on Outlook. A PDF with twenty photographed pages routinely crosses those limits, and shrinking it without ruining quality is harder than it should be.
Compress PDF handles this with a quality-aware compression pipeline that recognizes whether your PDF is text-heavy, scan-heavy, or mixed, and applies the right strategy for each.
How Much Can You Compress
On the Recommended preset, expect 50 to 70 percent savings on typical mixed-content PDFs. Scan-heavy PDFs on Strong can shrink 80 percent or more - those big image streams compress beautifully. Text-only PDFs rarely shrink much because there is little to compress in the first place.
Already-optimized PDFs - ones that were exported with good settings to begin with - sometimes refuse to shrink. We report the actual savings instead of pretending the output is smaller than it is.
Pick The Right Preset
Light keeps print quality intact - use this when the PDF is going to a printer or a high-resolution display. Recommended is visually indistinguishable from the source for most documents and is the right default for sharing.
Strong is aggressive - images are downsampled, JPEG quality drops, fonts may subset more tightly. Use Strong for email attachments where size matters more than perfect rendering.
How To Compress
Open Compress PDF, drag your file in, pick a preset, and click Compress. The file is processed on our cloud workers using Ghostscript - the same engine professional prepress shops use - and deleted within 24 hours.
Output downloads are signed and private. Only you can grab the result, and the URL expires quickly.
Why Compression Is Server-Side
Most pdf9x tools run in your browser, but compression is one of a small handful that benefit from cloud processing. Ghostscript's PDF compression algorithms produce dramatically better results than anything available in JavaScript, and they're CPU-heavy enough that running them in a browser tab would slow your machine to a crawl.
Files are encrypted in transit, processed in isolated short-lived workers, and deleted automatically. We never inspect contents.
Need to send a 50 MB PDF over email? Compress PDF usually gets it under 10 MB without any visible quality loss. Free up to 3 compresses per day.