Government portals and job sites often cap PDFs at 100KB. Here's how to reliably hit that limit free with PDFWix — and what to do if it refuses to shrink.
If you've applied to an Indian government job, a UPSC exam, a passport renewal, a university scholarship form or almost any state-portal upload, you've probably hit a hard 100KB ceiling on PDF uploads. The limit exists because these portals were designed in the early 2000s on shared hosting with tight per-row storage budgets, and the schema was never updated.
The same 100KB cap appears on many Western job-application portals (Workday and SAP SuccessFactors implementations, occasional federal grant submission forms) and visa-application sites. It is not a modern best practice — it's legacy infrastructure that millions of applicants still have to work around every week.
Open Compress PDF, drop your file, choose the Strong compression preset, and click Compress. For most text-heavy documents (resumes, cover letters, single-page certificates), the result is well below 100KB on the first attempt — often 30–60KB.
The Strong preset re-encodes embedded images at ~96 DPI, subsets fonts, strips metadata and removes unused PDF objects. The page layout, text and visual structure are preserved. The compression happens entirely in your browser — your file never leaves your device.
Some files genuinely cannot reach 100KB without losing information. The biggest culprits: high-resolution scanned photos (a single 2MB scan won't compress to 50KB), embedded signatures captured at high DPI, and PDFs that contain dozens of full-page images.
First fix: drop unnecessary pages with Remove Pages. A scanned 5-page document with one page of actual content compresses far better when you keep only the page you need.
Don't take a screenshot of your document and submit that. Screenshots are images — they balloon to 200–400KB and don't have selectable text, which many portals also reject.
Don't print to PDF from a browser preview at 'Save ink' settings hoping that creates a smaller file — it doesn't. The PDF includes full pages regardless of the preview rendering.
On a typed text PDF, no — the result stays crisp on screen and prints fine. On heavily scanned documents, expect mild softening; usually still legible but tighter than the original.
Compress PDF runs entirely in your browser — your file is never uploaded to our servers. The compression happens on your device using WebAssembly.
Some portals enforce both a max and a min. After hitting <100KB, if you're under the minimum, add an extra page or use a slightly weaker compression preset to land in range.