1. Use a dedicated PDF compressor
The fastest way is to drop your PDF into a dedicated compression tool. Our Compress PDF tool offers three levels — Low (fast, slight reduction), Medium (balanced), and High (maximum reduction). High compression re-encodes embedded images at a lower quality, which is usually invisible at normal reading sizes.
2. Reduce image quality before creating the PDF
If you are creating a PDF from images, downscale them first. A 6000×4000 photo embedded for on-screen reading is overkill — 1500×1000 at 90% JPEG quality is indistinguishable and eight times smaller.
3. Flatten form fields and annotations
Interactive PDFs with form fields, comments, and layers carry extra data. Flattening the document — burning annotations into the page — can cut file size dramatically. Many PDF viewers have a "Print to PDF" option that does this automatically.
4. Remove embedded fonts you do not need
PDFs can embed full font files to ensure consistent display. If your document only uses a few characters from a decorative font, the entire font file still gets embedded. Tools like Acrobat Pro can subset fonts, but for most web-shared PDFs this is rarely worth the effort.
5. Split large documents
If you only need to share part of a document, split it first. Our Split PDF tool lets you extract specific page ranges. A 10-page extract from a 200-page technical manual is obviously much smaller — and easier for the recipient to navigate.