Compress PDF

A PDF that won't attach to an email or upload to a portal needs to get smaller, and most compressors take the same shortcut without telling you: they flatten every page into an image. The file shrinks impressively, the text stops being text, and you find out weeks later when you try to search the document. Our free tool to compress pdf online free offers both approaches and is explicit about what each one costs.

**Lossless** rewrites the file's internal structure while leaving text, fonts, and vector graphics completely untouched. Everything stays selectable, searchable, and accessible. The saving is genuinely modest — sometimes only a few percent — because a well-made text PDF has little overhead to remove.

**Rasterise** converts each page to a JPEG at a resolution and quality you choose. This is the mode that produces dramatic reductions, and it is the right choice for scanned documents, which are already images so there is nothing left to lose. On a document with real text it is a permanent downgrade, so the tool checks for a text layer first and warns you clearly before you commit.

And when there is nothing worth compressing, it says so. If the saving comes in under five percent you get told the file is already about as small as it gets, rather than a 2%-smaller download presented as a win. Everything runs in your browser, unlike every major PDF compressor, which requires uploading your document first. Pair it with the PDF Splitter to send fewer pages, or PDF to JPG when you only need one page as an image.