How to Delete Pages from a PDF

Not every page in a PDF needs to stay. Scanners add blank pages between documents, cover sheets get left in after you no longer need them, and reports sometimes carry an extra draft page that was never removed before export. Deleting pages cleans this up without touching the rest of the document.

How the delete tool works

Every page loads as a clickable thumbnail (rendered by PDF.js, low-resolution and preview-only). Click a page to mark it for deletion — it gets a red border and a "Selected" badge — then confirm with the delete button. There's an undo option for about eight seconds after you delete, in case you select the wrong page. Once you're happy with what's left, the tool uses pdf-lib to copy every remaining page's original content into a new file — the pages you keep are untouched, byte-for-byte as accurate as the source, just with the unwanted ones gone.

When this is the right tool

Deleting pages is the fastest option when you need to remove a handful of specific pages — a blank scan, a duplicate, an outdated cover sheet — without reorganizing the rest of the document. If you're trying to divide a file into two separate documents rather than just trimming it down, the Split PDF tool is a better fit; delete is built for subtraction, not division.

Things worth knowing

• You can't delete every page. At least one page has to remain — the tool will stop you if your selection would leave nothing behind.
• Encrypted PDFs aren't supported. Password-protected files need to be unlocked with a PDF reader before pages can be removed.
• The undo window is short. Once it closes, you'd need to reload the original file and start over — so it's worth a quick look at the remaining page count before it expires.

Good practice

Before deleting, use the total/selected/remaining counter at the top of the tool to sanity-check what you're about to remove, especially in longer documents where it's easy to lose track of exactly which pages you've clicked. Keep the original file until you've confirmed the trimmed version looks right.