Links don’t work after saving Microsoft Word doc as PDF on a Mac; use an online converter

It’s surprising that this still isn’t fixed. But yes—when you save a Word doc to PDF or try to print to PDF—it completely removes all of the hyperlinks. It’s insidious because it leaves the blue underlined text styling in place. But that’s all it is: styled text. 

This does work on Windows, so if you have access to a Windows machine that has Microsoft Office, you can use that. Otherwise, use one of the many, many converters online such as Convertio. Also once you have your PDF, don't forget to run it through a compressor / optimizer. My test document was originally 19kb in Word, converted to a 203kb PDF, and then compressed down to 52kb.