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There are several reasons why you might want to optimize Adobe Acrobat PDFs specifically for your WordPress website. Sometimes, you might be publishing reports or presentations that contain a lot of jpg images, for example. In many cases, the images within these PDFs are at high resolution. If your report or presentation will be mostly for web viewing rather than printing, then the high resolution of these images will occupy more disk space and and take up more bandwidth than it really needs to. This post will show you how to optimize those PDFs so that they download as fast as possible and work best within your WordPress web site.
It is worth noting at the start that you do not necessarily need to optimize all your PDF files. For example, files that consist mostly or completely of text probably would not benefit greatly from optimization. The types of files that can be best optimized are those that contain a lot of JPG or similar images, especially of those files were not optimized in the first place.
Let’s say you have a report that needs to be placed on the web and you want to check to see if you need to optimize it. Browse to the file in your file explorer (I am using a Macintosh, but you can do the same thing in Windows). Check where it says, “Size” and note the size of the file. The size of the file shown in the example below is 26.6 MB. That is a large file and will take some users quite a while to download, especially if they have a low connection.
What you want to do is to make that file smaller, so that it downloads faster, but you want to do so without removing any content from the file. Here is how you do it:
Step 1. Open the file in Adobe Acrobat Pro. (You cannot do this operation in the free Reader version of Acrobat.)
Step 2. Go up to the Advanced menu and select the Advanced > PDF Optimizer option from the menu. You will get the following dialog.
Step 3. In the left-hand sidebar, leave whatever options are selected as they are. You will find that you have several options in the Image Settings panel, located in the center of the dialog box. Since this is going to be a web-based file, change all three of the Downsampling options to 72 ppi as shown above. The other options should adjust automatically for you and you can leave those as they are for now. Click OK.
Step 4. Save the file using a different name. For example, you might want to tack on the term, web, on your filename to show that you optimized it for web viewing. The lower right corner of your Acrobat window will show you the progress of the operation.
Step 5. Check the file size again using your file explorer, and you should see that the file is considerably smaller. In our example, the file was reduced to about 7 MB-much easier for readers to download now!
Again, remember that some files optimize better than others. If you are looking at a file that is already less than about 1 MB, you might not see a huge amount of reduction occur. On the other hand, if your file contains many uncompressed JPGs, as is often the case with reports that are assembled in Microsoft Word or Powerpoint. give PDF optimization a try. Your readers will thank you for it!
