Drop a PDF and get it back under 500KB with the quality intact. Free and private.
500KB is the usual cap on university applications, visa portals and corporate document uploads, and it is also a sensible ceiling for anything you are emailing — attachments under half a megabyte pass through every mail system without complaint.
At this size most documents keep their original resolution, so text stays crisp when zoomed and printing is unaffected.
Almost everything in a large PDF is images. A page scanned at high resolution, or a photograph of a document taken on a phone, carries far more detail than the file needs for screen reading or printing — and that detail is what makes the file large.
This tool redraws each page at a sensible resolution and re-encodes it, stepping the image quality down until the whole document fits under your target. Quality is reduced first because it costs the least visually; only if that is not enough does the resolution come down too. Page dimensions are preserved, so an A4 page stays A4 and still prints at the right size.
One consequence worth knowing: the result is a picture of each page rather than live text, so you will not be able to select or search the words afterwards. For a document you are uploading to a form that makes no difference. If you need the text to stay selectable, keep the original alongside the compressed copy.
PDFs are the format people keep the documents they would least like to hand over: mark sheets, bank statements, identity proofs, signed forms. Most online compressors ask you to upload that file to their server, where it sits for some period governed by a privacy policy you did not read.
This page does the work in your own browser. The file is opened locally, the pages are redrawn locally, and the new PDF is assembled locally. Nothing is transmitted, which is why it still works with your wifi switched off once the page has loaded.
Drop the PDF above and it is reduced until it fits under 500KB, then you download it. There are no settings to work out — the tool finds the highest quality that still fits.
Yes. 500KB leaves plenty of room — a ten-page scanned document usually fits with no visible change at all.
No. Because the work happens on your own device rather than a server, there is nothing to queue for and no upload cap. Very long documents take longer, and a phone may run out of memory on a hundred-page file where a laptop will not.
No. Everything happens inside your browser, so the document never leaves your device.