How to compress a PDF

Compression helps enormously with scanned documents and photo-heavy files. It does very little for text-only PDFs - and it is worth understanding why before you bother.

Open the free PDF editor →

Step by step

Open the PDFDrop your file into the editor.
Open the export menuClick the arrow beside Download.
Choose CompressThe pages are re-encoded at a smaller size. You are told exactly how much smaller the result is.
DownloadIf compressing would actually make the file bigger, you get the original instead - compression never inflates your file here.

Your file stays on your device. PDFree runs entirely in your browser - the PDF is never uploaded to a server, so private documents stay private.

Common questions

Why did my PDF not get smaller?

Because it is text, not scans. Text is stored as instructions and is already tiny; turning it into images would make it larger. Compression pays off on scanned pages and photos.

Does compressing reduce quality?

Scanned pages are re-encoded, so there is some quality loss. It is tuned to stay comfortably readable.

What does Flatten do instead?

Flatten bakes every edit permanently into the page so nothing can be moved or altered afterwards. It is about locking edits, not file size.