Delete PDF Pages
Name the pages you want gone and get back a document without them. The tool shows you what is being kept before anything is removed, because deletion is the one operation you cannot eyeball afterwards.
Related tools
How to delete pages from a PDF
- Drop your PDF in. It opens on your device — nothing is uploaded.
- Type the pages to remove — single numbers, ranges, or both:
1, 4-6, 12. - Check the two panels. One lists what is going, the other lists what survives.
- Remove, then download. Your original file is untouched.
Why the tool shows you what remains
Most PDF operations are easy to check afterwards. Merge two files and you can see whether they joined correctly. Rotate a page and you can look at it.
Deletion is different, and worse in a specific way: what you need to verify is absent. Once pages are gone, the remaining pages renumber themselves, and confirming that exactly the right ones disappeared means comparing against a document you no longer have open.
So the check has to happen before, not after. The panel showing which page numbers survive is the entire safety mechanism of this tool, and it lists the actual numbers rather than a count for a reason — "keeping 47 pages" tells you nothing useful, while seeing 1-3, 8-51 immediately shows whether the range you typed did what you meant.
Two mistakes it catches reliably:
Off-by-one from printed numbers. A report whose printed page 1 sits behind a cover and a contents page is at position 3. Typing 1 removes the cover, not the page marked 1.
Ranges that are inclusive at both ends. 4-6 is three pages, not two. Obvious written down, easy to get wrong at speed.
Positions, not printed numbers
Worth being explicit about, because it is the single most common source of confusion.
Page numbers here mean position in the file, counting from one. They have nothing to do with any number printed on the page.
A typical report might run: cover (position 1), blank (2), contents (3), then a body whose first page is printed "1" at position 4. Roman-numeralled front matter makes it worse — a document with pages i through viii before page 1 has that page 1 at position 9.
If you are unsure, open the document in any viewer and use the page counter in its toolbar. That counter shows position, which is the number this tool wants.
How the removal actually works
The tool does not delete pages from your document. It builds a new document containing only the pages you keep.
That sounds like a distinction without a difference, and it is not. It matters in two ways.
It avoids the classic off-by-one bug. Removing pages one at a time from a live document shifts every subsequent index as you go — delete page 3 and the old page 4 becomes page 3, so deleting "4" next removes what used to be page 5. Tools written that way quietly delete the wrong pages whenever more than one is selected, and the error is invisible unless you check carefully. Copying the survivors sidesteps it entirely, because the source is never modified and its indices never move.
The deleted content genuinely does not travel. Only the pages you keep are copied into the new file. Anything belonging solely to a removed page — its text, its images, its content stream — is simply not carried across.
That second point is worth dwelling on. Some ways of editing PDFs leave the original content in the file and merely stop displaying it, which is how confidential material has repeatedly been recovered from documents that were supposedly redacted. This is a different mechanism: the output file is constructed from scratch out of the pages you named, and a deleted page contributes nothing to it.
Shared resources are the one nuance. A font used across the whole document comes along, because surviving pages still need it. That affects the file size, not what is recoverable.
When to use this, and when to use something else
Use this when you are removing a minority of pages from a document you otherwise want intact — a blank sheet the scanner picked up, a page of internal notes before sending a report out, duplicate scans, a cover you do not need, an appendix that is not relevant.
Use Split PDF instead when you want to keep a small number of pages out of a large document. Extracting three pages is far less error-prone than deleting ninety-seven, and gets you the same file. Whichever list is shorter is the one worth typing.
Use a compression tool instead when the goal is a smaller file. Deleting pages helps only if the pages you delete were the heavy ones.
Do not use any of these for redaction. Removing a page removes the page. If sensitive information sits on a page you are keeping, hiding it needs proper redaction software that removes the underlying content — drawing a black box over text in an editor leaves the text sitting underneath it, selectable and copyable.
Limits and requirements
At least one page must remain. A PDF with no pages is not a valid document, so the tool refuses rather than producing something broken.
Positions, not printed numbers. Counting starts at 1 and includes covers, blanks and front matter.
Password-protected files will not open. Remove the password first, in software that has it.
Document-level structures may not survive. Bookmarks pointing at deleted pages, internal cross-references and digital signatures are all affected by removing pages. Signatures are invalidated by design — any change to a signed document breaks the signature, which is the point of having one.
Browser support. Any modern browser on desktop or mobile. No installation, no account.
Privacy: how this tool handles your document
The file is read from your disk into your browser's memory, a new document is assembled there, and it downloads back to your disk. No network request carries any part of it. Nothing is transmitted, logged or stored, and closing the tab discards everything.
The reasoning is sharper here than for most tools. Think about why people delete pages: an appendix with client names before sending a report to a third party, a page of internal pricing before a proposal goes out, a scanned bank statement page inside a mortgage application, a medical letter in the wrong file.
The pages being removed are, very often, the pages that must not be seen by anyone else. Uploading the complete document — including those pages — to an unfamiliar server in order to remove them is precisely the wrong shape of operation. The sensitive content reaches the third party before it is deleted, which is the opposite of what the user is trying to achieve.
Doing it locally makes that impossible rather than merely promising against it. You can confirm as much: open developer tools, watch the Network tab while you remove pages, and see that nothing carries your file. Or disconnect from the internet after the page has loaded. The tool keeps working, because it never needed a connection in the first place.
Frequently asked questions
How do I choose which pages to remove?
Type page numbers and ranges separated by commas — 1, 4-6, 12 removes page one, pages four through six, and page twelve. Numbers refer to the position in the document, counting from one, not to any page number printed on the page itself. A report whose body starts at printed page 1 but sits behind a cover and a contents page will have that body page as position 3.
Does deleting pages make the file smaller?
Usually, but rarely in proportion. A new document is built from the pages you keep, so anything used only by a deleted page — its images, its content stream — is left behind. But fonts, colour profiles and other shared resources are often referenced by many pages, so they come along as long as any surviving page needs them. Removing half the pages from a text-heavy report might save very little; removing a few image-heavy pages can save a lot. If size is the goal, compression is the tool for it.
Is the deleted content really gone, or just hidden?
Really gone. The tool copies the pages you keep into a brand new document rather than marking the others as removed, so nothing from a deleted page is carried across. This is worth knowing because some approaches to PDF editing leave the original content in the file and simply stop displaying it, which means it can be recovered. That is not what happens here — anything on a page you removed is not in the output file at all.
Can I get the pages back if I make a mistake?
Your original file is never modified — the result downloads as a separate document — so you always still have the complete original to try again from. That is why the tool shows the surviving page numbers before you commit rather than after: with the original intact, a mistake costs you nothing but a second attempt.
What if I want to keep a few pages rather than remove most of them?
Use the Split PDF tool instead and extract the pages you want. Naming three pages to keep is far less error-prone than naming ninety-seven to delete, and the result is identical. As a rule, whichever list is shorter is the one you should be typing.
Why can I not delete every page?
Because a PDF must contain at least one page to be a valid document. A file with none would not open in most viewers, and the ones that did open it would show an error rather than an empty document. The tool stops you rather than producing something broken. If the goal is to get rid of the whole file, deleting the file itself is the operation you want.
Do bookmarks, links and form fields survive?
Page content, text, images and annotations on the pages you keep come across intact. Document-level structures are less reliable: a bookmark pointing at a deleted page has nothing to point to, and internal links between pages can break when the numbering shifts. Forms and digital signatures are the most fragile — a signature covering the whole document is invalidated by any change to it, which is by design. Check anything structural in the output if the document relies on it.
Is my PDF uploaded anywhere?
No. The file is read and rewritten entirely inside your browser using pdf-lib. Nothing is transmitted, logged or stored, and closing the tab discards everything. This is worth caring about here in particular: pages get deleted from documents precisely because they contain something that should not be shared, and uploading the full document to a stranger's server in order to remove the sensitive part rather defeats the exercise.