Why this PDF optimizer
🔬 Analyze first
Before touching anything, the tool inspects your PDF — images, resolutions, fonts, objects, metadata — and tells you exactly what's making it big, with concrete recommendations.
🗜️ Real compression
Powered by Ghostscript and qpdf, it downsamples oversized images, recompresses streams, removes unused objects and enables Fast Web View — image-heavy PDFs often shrink 70–95%.
🎛️ You're in control
Pick Lossless, Balanced or Maximum, or fine-tune every step manually — DPI, JPEG quality, and what to strip. A size estimate shows the impact before you run it.
How to compress a PDF
- Upload your PDF. It's analyzed immediately and you get a full structure report plus recommendations.
- Choose a profile. Lossless (cleanup only), Balanced (300 DPI / JPEG 90%) or Maximum (150 DPI / 75%, strips extras) — or switch to manual.
- Review the estimate. See the predicted size before committing.
- Optimize & download. Get the smaller PDF plus a report of exactly what was done and the real before/after sizes.
Frequently asked questions
- How much can it shrink my PDF?
- It depends on the file. Image-heavy PDFs often shrink by 70–95% with Balanced or Maximum, because oversized photos are downsampled. Text-only or already-optimized PDFs shrink much less — the tool shows an estimate before, and the real before/after after.
- What's the difference between the profiles?
- Lossless only cleans up structure (removes unused objects, recompresses, enables Fast Web View) without touching images, fonts or text. Balanced downsamples images to 300 DPI at JPEG quality 90%. Maximum goes to 150 DPI at 75% and strips metadata, attachments, JavaScript and comments.
- Will optimizing damage my PDF?
- No. Text stays text, page order and content are preserved, and quality only changes if you choose a profile or option that touches images. Lossless never changes how the document looks.
- Where is the file processed?
- Optimization uses server-side Ghostscript and qpdf for the best results, so the PDF is uploaded to our own server, processed, and deleted immediately after — leftovers are removed automatically within 30 minutes. Nothing is stored permanently.
- What is Fast Web View?
- Fast Web View (linearization) restructures a PDF so it can start displaying the first page before the whole file has downloaded. The optimizer can enable it as part of any profile.
- Can it optimize signed or encrypted PDFs?
- Encrypted PDFs must be unlocked first. Signed PDFs can be analyzed, but optimizing rewrites the file and would invalidate the signature, so the tool warns you before proceeding.