Compress PDF Resume & CV

Aim for under 1 MB, and ideally around 200–500 KB. A plain text-based CV is naturally under 100 KB. Anything above 2 MB suggests uncompressed images or fully embedded font families, and risks rejection by stricter application portals.

No, provided your CV contains real text rather than being a picture of a document. Our presets never rasterize text, so it remains fully selectable and machine-readable. If you exported your CV as an image-only PDF, ATS software could not read it before compression either.

Design tools embed full font families rather than subsets, store background graphics at print resolution, and often include a high-resolution headshot. Compressing subsets the fonts and downsamples those images to screen resolution, which typically reduces the file by 70–90% with no visible change.

Page dimensions, margins and layout are always preserved exactly. Print appearance only changes if images are downsampled below your printer's resolution. Less Compression holds images near 200 DPI, which prints cleanly on any office printer; avoid Extreme mode for anything going to paper.

Because it was already efficient. Files that are mostly text, or that were exported by a tool which already downsampled its images, hold very little recoverable waste. Large savings come from oversized embedded images — where there are none, there is little to reclaim.

Yes, with no file limits, no watermarks and no account. Because processing happens on your device rather than our servers, there is no per-file cost to recover and therefore no reason to meter your usage.

Your PDF was probably already optimized — for instance exported by Acrobat with compression enabled, or generated as pure text with subset fonts. When we cannot beat the original we deliberately return your untouched file rather than a worse one.

Yes, and this is usually desirable. Author names, the originating software, revision history, comment threads and XMP blocks are stripped. That reduces file size and removes information you may not want to share — a genuine privacy benefit when sending documents externally.

It is gone from the page entirely. The document is held only in the tab's volatile memory during processing and is discarded when the tab closes. Nothing is written to browser storage, no cookie records it, and no copy exists anywhere else — your original stays untouched on disk.

Not directly. Encrypted PDFs must have their password removed first, which you can do in Acrobat, Preview on macOS, or by opening the file and re-printing it to PDF with the password supplied. Then compress the unprotected copy here.