Need to shrink a PDF file down to less than 1 MB for online submission? Let Smallpdf help you—free of charge and without watermarks or registration!
COVID-19 has solidified the shift to digital workplaces and paperless document management. Submitting files online doesn’t only save you the trip to hand them in personally, but it’s now the norm. However, many websites have a file size limit. So, what do you do when the limit is 1MB but your file is larger? Easy, just compress it to less than 1 MB with our free PDF compressor!
How to Compress a PDF To 1mb or Less for Free
Visit our online tool for PDF compression.
Upload or drop your PDF file into the toolbox.
Choose “Basic Compression”—you’ll see the estimated compression rate.
Download your compressed PDF file.
How to quickly reduce the size of PDFs to as little as 1 MB (or even KB!)
Using the best technology on the market, we’ll reduce your PDF documents’ size while maintaining the highest file quality. With basic compression, your file won’t be discernible from the original except by size. However, the stronger the compression level, the more distortion may occur in the compressed document, especially in files containing many images. Therefore strong compression, a Pro feature, may result in minimal quality losses.
Compress Non-PDF Files
Compressing your PDFs isn’t all we can do, though! Our online PDF compression tool can also reduce the file size of other file types, including JPG, Word, PPT, and Excel. Once you upload one of these documents, we’ll first turn your file into a PDF so our compressor can shrink the file, as described above.
Don’t think we’ll just leave you hanging with a PDF file when you wanted a compressed Word document! Of course, we can convert the compressed PDF back to its original format. Just head over to the PDF Converter, drag and drop the file, and we’ll take care of the rest.
Secure and Free PDF Compressing
From the moment you upload your file to when you download your compressed PDF, we’ll make sure that it goes through the utmost secure processing environment. On top of that, our servers automatically delete uploaded files after an hour of processing.
Once you’ve reduced the size of a PDF file, the tool will display a few options to continue working on your file before downloading it. For instance, many people compress PDFs to 1 MB or less for emailing or online submissions. But if the file contains sensitive information, you may want to protect it. You can do this by encrypting your compressed PDFs with a password using our Protect PDF tool—just choose this option on the result page to go straight to the tool before downloading your file.
Compress PDF to 1MB Offline
While some prefer to upload and compress PDFs without installing software, others prefer the comfort of traditional PDF software to manage files locally. To accommodate this, we’ve developed the Smallpdf Desktop app, which allows conversion, modification, and, of course, compression offline. Give it a try!
Just a visualization of how we compress PDFs to 1MB (or less!)
