Having countless PDF documents on a computer with limited disk capacity means that you will soon start worrying about remaining free space. Before considering backing up your data (which you should do, mandatory) and deleting files from the PC, you can resort to tools specialized in reducing PDF file size, sch as Smallpdf.

Designed with the casual user in mind, this tiny application is wrapped in an elegant interface that puts emphasis on simplicity. You just have to drop the target PDFs in the main window and let the app handle the compression job on its own.

Several aspects have to be mentioned here. Firstly, batch processing is not truly supported because Smallpdf doesn't have features implemented for creating a queue of multiple PDFs to compress at the same time. Instead, it opens a new instance for every dropped PDF and waits for your input, so you should be careful when attempting to compress dozens of dropped PDFs unless you want to get spammed by numerous windows.

In addition to PDF compression, Smallpdf is capable of turning documents into other file types: Microsoft Word (.docx), Excel (.xlsx), PowerPoint (.pptx) and JPG. Worth noting is that no dependencies are required for successful conversions, like the Microsoft Office package or Adobe Acrobat Reader.

More options are listed for editing, merging, splitting, rotating, signing, protecting and unlocking PDFs but they are currently greyed out. We can only assume the developer plans to introduce these features in future updates.

The tool successfully compressed PDF files in our tests, resulting in smaller file size at no quality cost. Similarly, it converted PDFs to other filetypes without sacrificing quality.

On the other hand, it doesn't have a batch processing mode. Nevertheless, Smallpdf is a relatively fresh software product so there's plenty of time for improvements.

Compress PDF Convert PDF Reduce PDF size PDF Compress Compression Reduce