How to Optimize PDFs and Images for the Web

To re-size your PDF prior to upload:

**PDFs should be very rare on your website. They are generally inaccessible for people using assistive technology. Please consider creating the content as a webpage instead of uploading PDFs.

If you still feel you need to have a PDF, they should be optimized, resized and made accessible prior to uploading. 

You can use a free tool like smallpdf.com to resize your PDFs. This tool allows you to resize your PDFs up to two per hour. There is a very small monthly fee if you need to do more than that.

OR, if you already have Adobe Professional, do this:

Open the PDF in Adobe Professional (not Reader) and choose:

File > Save As Other > Optimized PDF

OR

File > Save As Other > Reduced Size PDF

Then upload your PDF to the Campus WCMS.

Making PDFs Accessible

Before placing any PDFs on your site, it's a good idea to think about whether or not the information in the PDF NEEDS to be in PDF format. PDFs take some work to make them accessible for people using assistive technology but the best way to display information on a web page is to put it in ON the web page as HTML. 

IF you decide the content needs to stay in PDF format, you'll need to make it accessible. Here are some helpful tools:

PDF Accessibility via WebAIM

PDF Techniques from WCAG 2.0

Meeting Accessibility Standards from Adobe

To re-size your image prior to upload:

Make sure that images are 72dpi and resized down to below 100kb as a file size.

Save it as a .JPG.  (.png are not compressed and can be very large.)

UCSC has a good image editor and your computer's image editor works as well.