1Drop your PDF documents into the box above, or pick them from your device — there is nothing to install and no account to create.
2Choose how hard to squeeze: a quality or bitrate target, and optionally smaller dimensions if size matters more to you than detail.
3Start the job and let the workers re-pack the file; your original is never modified in place.
4Compare the new size against the original, then download the compressed PDF file.
Compress PDF FAQ
Does the format of my file change how much I can save?
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Very much so. PDF fixes the page: fonts, vectors, raster images and text coordinates are frozen so every reader sees identical layout. That determines both the headroom available and whether the saving costs you anything in fidelity.
Is there anything specific to PDF I should know before compressing?
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Yes — a PDF is an object graph, not a page image, so text stays selectable and vectors stay sharp no matter what happens to the raster content inside it. It is worth knowing before you overwrite an original you might need again.
What is the most common mistake when compressing PDF documents?
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Compressing the same file repeatedly. Each pass on a lossy format is a fresh generation of loss and the savings shrink while the damage accumulates. Go from the original to your target in one step, and keep the original.
How does Compress PDF actually make the file smaller?
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Concretely, embedded raster images are downsampled to a target DPI, fonts are subsetted to the glyphs actually used and the object streams are rebuilt — text and vector artwork are untouched and stay perfectly sharp. Nothing about it depends on you installing software: the job runs server-side and hands back a finished file.
Can I run Compress PDF on several PDF documents at once?
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Yes — upload the set and they process in parallel under one set of settings, which is the point of doing a document workflow here rather than clicking through a desktop reader.
Do bookmarks, links and form fields survive?
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Outlines, internal links and annotations are preserved wherever the operation allows it. Digital signatures are the exception: any change to the file necessarily invalidates a signature, because that is precisely what a signature is for.
Is there a file size limit on Compress PDF?
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Yes: free accounts process documents up to 25 MB each, which covers most reports and contracts but not a long scanned document at 600 DPI; Ghostscript and qpdf do the work. Scanned PDFs are the usual thing that exceeds it, and compressing the document first is normally enough to bring it back under.
Will Compress PDF lower the quality of my PDF documents?
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Text and vector artwork are objects rather than pixels, so they stay perfectly sharp at any zoom no matter what happens. Only the embedded raster images can degrade, and only if the operation you chose resamples them.
Why does a Word site host Compress PDF?
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WORD.to is built around the editable end of a document's life — the DOCX that is still being written, still being styled and still being argued over, before anyone flattens it for sending. Office files are containers full of other people's media — images, embedded audio, fonts — so the work people need on them is usually the work they would need on those contents anyway. Compress PDF shares the upload, the caps and the account with the conversions for that reason.
What should I do with the result once Compress PDF is finished?
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The converter on this site takes documents out to PDF for sending, to images for embedding and to plain text for anything that has to read them programmatically, and back the other way. Doing that afterwards keeps the editable original around, which is the part you cannot get back once it has been flattened.
Is Compress PDF here the same tool the sibling sites run?
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The engines are shared — the same document toolchain, the same workers, the same limits. What a Word site adds is a view on what survives leaving the Office format and what does not, which is the question every one of these jobs actually turns on. It also starts from one fact about the format this site is named after: the document is a zip of XML, so text edits are cheap and the weight is almost always the embedded images.
Do I need an account, and does anything get kept?
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No account, and nothing is kept: uploads are deleted from the workers shortly after the job finishes, nothing is read and nothing is indexed. Free accounts exist for history and batch size, not for access.
