Work visually through page thumbnails, or type the page numbers and ranges you want gone. The pages you keep are copied untouched — text stays selectable. No signup needed.
Delete Pages NowRemove unwanted pages from your documents in three easy steps
Drag and drop your PDF file or click to browse. View all pages as thumbnails for easy selection.
Hover a page and tap its trash icon, or type the numbers you want gone — 2, 5-7 — into the delete-by-number box.
Click delete and download your cleaned PDF instantly. Original quality preserved, no watermarks.
One is for when you need to look at the page first. The other is for when you already know the numbers.
Every page appears as a thumbnail down the left. Hover one and a trash icon appears in its corner; tap that and the page is gone from the working document. This is the right approach for the jobs where the page number is not the point — hunting blank sheets in a scan, dropping the frame where the feeder pulled two sheets at once, clearing duplicates you only recognise by looking.
Deletion takes effect immediately and there is no undo for it. If you remove the wrong page, the way back is to add the PDF again and start over. Worth knowing before you work through a long document quickly.
The Or delete by number box takes a list, and it is considerably faster than clicking through forty thumbnails. Type your list and press Enter, or just click away from the box — both apply it. Page numbers are one-based, so page 1 is the first page, exactly as your reader displays it.
| What you type | What happens |
|---|---|
| 3 | Page 3 is removed |
| 2, 5, 9 | Those three pages are removed |
| 5-7 | Pages 5, 6 and 7 are removed |
| 1-3, 8, 11-12 | Lists and ranges mix freely |
| 7-5 | Nothing. Ranges must run low to high |
| 40, in a 20-page file | Nothing. Out-of-range numbers are ignored silently |
| 1-20, in a 20-page file | Refused, with a warning — at least one page has to remain |
Those last three rows are the ones that catch people out. A reversed range and an out-of-range number both fail quietly rather than complaining, so if nothing seems to have happened, check the direction and the page count first.
Your original file is never modified. Everything happens on a copy held in the browser's memory, and nothing is written until you click download. Close the tab without downloading and the PDF on your disk is exactly as it was.
The single most common surprise after deleting pages, and it is not a bug.
A PDF carries two entirely separate ideas of a page number, and deleting pages affects only one of them.
The first is the document's internal page index — the position a page occupies in the file. That one always renumbers itself. Remove page 5 from a twenty-page document and what used to be page 6 becomes page 6 of nineteen; your reader's page counter will say so, and jumping to a page works normally.
The second is any page number printed on the page, in a header or footer. That is not a number the PDF understands — it is ink, drawn onto the page when the document was created, no different from a paragraph of text. Deleting other pages cannot change it. So after removing page 5, the pages you kept will still be marked 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7 and so on, with a gap exactly where you cut.
If that gap matters — and in anything you are sending to a client, a court or a printer it usually does — stamp fresh numbering over the top with the page numbers tool after you finish deleting. Do it in that order; numbering first and deleting second recreates the same problem.
Neither is a reason to avoid deleting pages. They are a reason to read through the result once before sending it, paying attention to anything that refers to a page by number.
If you are removing pages for confidentiality, this distinction is the one that matters.
When you delete a page and download the result, that page is genuinely not in the new file. The output is assembled from the pages you kept, together with the fonts and images those pages use; what you removed is not carried along in some hidden layer. For getting a whole confidential page out of a document, deletion is the correct and complete tool.
The trouble starts when the sensitive material is on a page you need to keep. Removing the surrounding pages does nothing about it, and neither does drawing a black rectangle over the text — a shape sitting on top of a paragraph hides it from your eyes while the text underneath remains in the file, ready to be selected, copied or extracted by anyone who thinks to try. That failure has embarrassed a long list of large organisations.
Genuinely removing part of a page means deleting the underlying content, not covering it. In practice, for a page that is mostly fine with one paragraph that has to go, the reliable route is to cover the area and then flatten the page so the markings become part of the image rather than an object sitting above live text. The annotation tools can flatten on export for exactly this reason.
Before sending anything sensitive, test it. Open the file you are about to send, try to select the text you think you removed, and search the document for a word that should no longer be there. Thirty seconds of checking beats finding out afterwards.
One more thing worth checking on a document you are sanitising: the file's own metadata. Title, author and subject fields are stored separately from any page and are not affected by deleting pages, so a document whose confidential pages are gone can still be carrying the name of the person who wrote it or an internal filename in its properties.
Removing pages does not degrade the ones you keep, and it is worth knowing why.
The pages you keep are copied across, not re-drawn. Their content arrives in the new document as the same objects it was before, which means:
This is genuinely different from what resizing does. Changing a document's page size requires re-rendering every page into an image, which costs you selectable text. Deleting pages requires no such thing, so it costs you nothing at all on the pages that remain.
The file will usually get smaller, roughly in proportion to what you cut, because the material belonging only to the removed pages is left behind. Do not expect the arithmetic to be exact. A font embedded for the whole document travels with the file as long as any surviving page uses it, and an image that appeared on several pages is kept if even one of those pages stays.
If your actual goal is a smaller file rather than a shorter one, deleting pages is a slow way to get there. Most of a PDF's weight is in its images, and re-encoding those is a different tool with a much bigger effect.
With the specific thing to watch for in each.
Duplex scanners produce a blank back for every single-sided sheet, so a thirty-page stack arrives as sixty pages, every other one empty. Work through the thumbnails rather than the number box — a "blank" page from a scanner is often not quite blank, carrying faint show-through from the other side or a grey edge from the platen, and you want to see which is which.
This is what the range box is for. Find the first and last page of the section in your reader, type them as 48-63, and press Enter. Then check the contents page and the page numbering, per the section above — a report is precisely the kind of document where a numbering gap looks careless.
Effective, with the caveat that it only works when the sensitive content is confined to whole pages. Read the section on redaction above before you rely on it, and check the metadata while you are there.
Reasonable, though worth comparing against your print dialogue's own page range field, which does the same job without producing a second file. Deleting is the better choice when you will need the shortened version more than once, or when someone else has to print it.
Combining documents that overlap — two versions of a contract, say — tends to leave repeated pages. The thumbnails make these easy to spot. Read carefully before deleting: near-identical pages from two revisions are exactly the situation where the differences matter most.
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Including what the tool will not do, which is usually the more useful half.
Add your PDF, then either hover a page thumbnail and tap the trash icon in its corner, or type the pages you want gone into the delete-by-number box — something like 2, 5-7 — and press Enter. Download the result when the document looks right.
Yes, through the number box, which accepts single pages and ranges in any combination: 1-3, 8, 11-12 removes all six of those pages in one go. There is no Ctrl or Cmd multi-select on the thumbnails; to work visually you remove pages one at a time, which is usually what you want when you are checking each one anyway.
No. Deletion applies immediately and there is no undo step, so if you remove the wrong page the way back is to add the PDF again and start over. Nothing is permanently lost, though — your original file is never modified. Everything happens on a copy in the browser and nothing is written until you download.
No. The pages you keep are copied across as the objects they already were, not re-rendered into images. Text stays selectable and searchable, images keep their original resolution, vector graphics stay vector, and fonts travel with the file.
No, and this surprises most people. A PDF has two separate page numbers. The internal index always renumbers, so your reader's page counter is correct. But a number printed in a header or footer is ink drawn onto the page, not something the PDF understands, so those stay exactly as they were — remove page 5 and the rest still read 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7. Stamp fresh numbering with the page numbers tool after you finish deleting if the gap matters.
Almost always one of two things. Ranges have to run from low to high, so 5-7 works and 7-5 does nothing at all. And numbers outside the document are ignored, so typing 40 in a twenty-page file has no effect. Both fail quietly rather than showing an error, which is what makes them confusing.
No. The tool refuses with a warning if your selection would empty the document, because a PDF with no pages is not a valid file. At least one page has to remain.
Usually, and roughly in proportion to how much you removed, because the material belonging only to the deleted pages is left behind. Do not expect exact arithmetic: a font stays embedded as long as any surviving page uses it, and an image that appeared on several pages is kept if even one of those pages remains. If a smaller file is your actual goal rather than a shorter document, compression will do far more, since most of a PDF's weight is in its images.
For a whole page, effectively yes — a deleted page is genuinely absent from the file you download, not hidden in a layer. But it does nothing for sensitive content on a page you are keeping, and covering that content with a black rectangle does not remove it either: the text underneath stays in the file and can still be selected or copied. Removing part of a page means flattening the markings into the page, not drawing over live text.
Only if you have the password. Remove the protection first with the unlock tool, then delete pages as normal. Without the password the document cannot be opened for editing at all, which is the point of the protection.
No. The PDF is opened, modified and rewritten entirely by your own browser, so it never leaves your device. Nothing is stored on a server, which also means nothing needs deleting afterwards.
Yes, for files up to 50MB, with no watermark and no signup. Pro accounts handle files up to 300MB.
Yes. The thumbnails and the trash icon respond to touch, and the number box works the same way it does on a desktop. For a long document the number box is considerably less fiddly on a small screen.
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