Compress PDF Free — No Size Limit, No Sign Up
Reduce PDF file size by up to 70% free — no file size limit, no sign-up, no watermark. Choose Light, Medium, or Heavy compression. Text stays perfectly sharp at every level because PDF text is stored as vector data, not pixels. Powered by Ghostscript running locally in your browser via WebAssembly — your documents never leave your device.
Drop a PDF file here or click to select
PDFs up to 150MB supported on desktop
Compressing...
How to Compress PDF Free
Open the compressor
Go to www.ilikepdf.tech/compress-pdf — no account, no email, no software to install.
Upload your PDF
Click "Select PDF to Compress" or drag and drop. PDFs up to 150MB are supported.
Choose compression level
Light (20-30%) for professional print quality. Medium (40-50%) for email and general sharing. Heavy (60-70%) for maximum compression.
Compress and download
Ghostscript processes locally in 5-30 seconds. Download — no watermark.
Compress large PDFs with no size limit
Many free online compressors silently cap uploads at 10-50MB or throttle large files behind a paywall. ILikePdf has no artificial size limit because it does not upload your file at all — Ghostscript runs inside your browser tab, so the only real limit is your device memory.
How PDF compression works
Ghostscript applies five simultaneous optimizations: (1) Image downsampling — photos are resampled from high DPI to optimal resolution; (2) JPEG recompression — images are re-encoded at a quality level matched to your chosen compression tier; (3) Font subsetting — embedded fonts are trimmed to only include characters used in the document; (4) Metadata stripping — creation history, author names, and thumbnail previews are removed; (5) Stream compression — all content streams are recompressed with the most efficient lossless algorithm.
About Compress PDF
PDF files grow quickly when they contain images, scans, or embedded fonts, and oversized documents get rejected by email servers and upload portals. ILikePdf Compress reduces file size by re-encoding pages and downsampling images with three quality presets — Light, Medium, and Heavy — so you can balance size against quality for any audience. The compression engine runs in your browser, which means your documents never travel over the network. If a file is already optimally sized, the tool tells you instead of producing a larger copy.
How to compress a PDF Compress PDF
Common use cases for Compress PDF
- Shrink large PDFs below email attachment limits before sending.
- Reduce file size before uploading to portals that cap document sizes.
- Optimize image-heavy brochures and portfolios for faster web delivery.
- Make room on storage drives by compressing old scanned archives.
Pro tips
- Heavy compression on text-only PDFs rarely helps — text-based files are already compact.
- The tool reports if the result would be larger than the original, so you never download a bigger file by accident.
- For maximum quality, use Light mode: it reduces size while keeping text selectable.
Frequently asked questions
Scanned documents compress 50-70%. Presentation PDFs with photos compress 40-60%. Text-heavy CVs and reports compress 10-30%.
Never. Text in PDFs is stored as vector data — it is completely unaffected by compression. Only raster images (photos, scanned pages, illustrations) are optimized.
No. Everything runs locally in your browser using WebAssembly. Your PDF never reaches any server.
Light (20-30%) resamples images to 300 DPI — ideal for professional printing. Medium (40-50%) targets 150 DPI — perfect for screen viewing. Heavy (60-70%) targets 72 DPI — maximum size reduction.