How to Reduce the Size of a PDF
An oversized PDF is hard to email (attachments are often capped at 10–25 MB) or to publish. The good news: you can shrink it without starting over. Here’s how, and what to know about quality.
Why is a PDF sometimes so heavy?
A PDF’s size comes mainly from the images it contains (photos, high-resolution scans) and how the document was saved. A scanned or image-rich PDF can easily exceed several dozen megabytes.
Reduce a PDF’s size, step by step
1. Add your PDF file.
2. Start the compression.
3. Download the lighter version.
The document structure is optimised to reduce its size while keeping it readable.
Is document quality preserved?
The goal is to cut weight while keeping a fully readable document. On very image-heavy PDFs, strong compression may slightly soften visuals — the usual trade-off between size and sharpness.
Other handy PDF tools
If you want to combine several documents, merging PDFs is a better fit. To pull out pages, splitting a PDF does the job. And to make a PDF editable, PDF → Word conversion is designed for that.