Compress PDF & Reduce File Size
Choose stronger image-based compression for scans or a lighter text-preserving rewrite for documents that need selectable text.
Why compress PDFs?
Large PDFs cause real problems. Email bounces, slow uploads, storage limits. Compression solves all of that without making your documents look worse.
Email attachments
Most email providers cap attachments at 25MB. A compressed PDF slides through without issues.
Faster uploads
Uploading to Dropbox, Google Drive, or a client portal? Smaller files mean less waiting.
Save storage
Archiving years of documents? Compression can cut storage costs significantly.
How PDF compression works
Select your PDF
Drag and drop or click to browse. Your file loads instantly — nothing is uploaded.
Choose a method
Use Extreme or Balanced for image-based raster compression, or Preserve Text for a lighter non-raster rewrite.
Download the result
Your compressed PDF is ready in seconds. Compare file sizes and save.
What actually gets compressed?
Extreme and Balanced render each PDF page to an image and rebuild the PDF from JPEG page images. This can be effective for scans and image-heavy documents, but it also flattens selectable text, links, form controls, annotations, and other interactive page features.
Preserve Text does not rasterize the pages. It rewrites the PDF using object streams, which keeps page text and vector content but may produce only a small reduction on files that are already optimized.
Lyonite compares the generated result with the source file. If the selected method would make the PDF larger, the downloadable result stays at the original size instead.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much smaller will my PDF get?
It depends on the file. Scans and image-heavy PDFs usually have more room to shrink with the raster modes. Text-heavy or already optimized files may shrink only slightly. If a generated result would be larger than the source, Lyonite keeps the original instead.
Will my PDF look worse after compression?
Extreme and Balanced both rasterize the PDF pages, so some visual quality can be lost. Balanced uses a higher render resolution and JPEG quality than Extreme. For documents that need selectable text or vector page content, choose Preserve Text instead.
Can I compress password-protected PDFs?
Not directly. If the PDF is encrypted, you'll need to remove the password first (using Adobe Acrobat or similar). Once it's unprotected, compression works normally.
Are form fields and links preserved?
In Extreme and Balanced modes, pages are flattened to images, so links, selectable text, form controls, annotations, and similar interactive features are not preserved as interactive PDF objects. Preserve Text avoids that page rasterization, but any rewritten PDF with critical forms or signatures should still be tested before distribution.