How to Add a Watermark to a PDF — Free, Live Preview, Per-Page Control

Watermarks signal three things at a glance: this is confidential, this is a draft, or this is mine. Adding one to a PDF should be a 10-second job.

Steps

Open the Watermark PDF tool
Drop your PDF — every page renders as a thumbnail
Type your watermark text (DRAFT, CONFIDENTIAL, your company name, etc.)
Live preview: each thumbnail shows exactly where the watermark will land
Click any page to skip it — the watermark won't appear there
Click Apply watermark — download starts immediately

What the watermark looks like

Diagonal text at -30°
Centred on the page
25% opacity grey — visible but doesn't obscure the underlying content
Font size scales with page dimensions (~⅛ of the page width)

Common use cases

Pre-sale: stamp DRAFT before sharing a proposal so the client doesn't mistake it for final
Internal review: CONFIDENTIAL on board materials
Portfolios: your name across each page so screenshots can't strip attribution
Sample copies: SPECIMEN on documents you send as examples

Why skip individual pages?

Cover pages and contracts often shouldn't be watermarked even if the body is. Click the cover thumbnail to deselect — the watermark appears on pages 2 through N only.

Selecting all pages quickly

Click Select all to re-add every page. Invert selection is great when you want every page except the few you initially clicked.

Privacy

The PDF is processed on our server (we need pdf-lib to embed the text) but discarded the moment the watermarked file is generated. Nothing is stored.

Open Watermark PDF →