Delete PDF pages

How to delete pages from a PDF

1. Drop your PDF You'll see every page as a thumbnail.
2. Click the pages to remove. They highlight as you select them.
3. Click Delete, then Download. The new PDF has everything except those pages. The original file sits where it always was.

Deleting versus keeping

Scanned documents collect junk: the blank back of every double-sided sheet, a fax cover page, the duplicate someone stapled in twice. Clearing it out is what this page is for. Keeping three pages out of forty is the opposite job, and Extract pages does it in three clicks instead of thirty-seven.

Are the deleted pages really gone?

This matters more than it sounds, because "delete a page" is often shorthand for "make sure nobody sees this page". The answer depends entirely on how the deletion was done, and the common way gets it wrong.

PDF supports incremental saving: rather than rewrite the file, an editor can append a small update to the end saying what changed. It is fast, and it is how many desktop applications save by default. But an appended "these pages are no longer in the document" instruction doesn't remove anything. The original page data is still sitting in the file, earlier on, and anyone with a text editor or a recovery tool can get it back. Documents have leaked this way, including some well-publicised ones.

This tool rebuilds the document from scratch instead. The pages you kept are written into a brand-new file, and the pages you removed are never written. There is no earlier version inside the result to recover, because the result has no history. What you download contains the pages you chose and nothing else.

One related caution: deleting a page removes that page, not information stored elsewhere in the document. Metadata, attachments and form data are document-level and survive. If the goal is a file that is safe to hand over, the privacy scanner lists what else is in there, and Redact PDF is the tool for removing sensitive content from a page you need to keep.

Why the file doesn't shrink much

Delete ten pages from a fifty-page file and the size may barely move. The pages are gone, but a PDF keeps its fonts, images and colour profiles in a shared pool, and anything still used by a remaining page has to stay. If the document embeds four typefaces and every one of them is used somewhere in the pages you kept, all four remain, and fonts are frequently the largest thing in a text-heavy PDF.

Scanned documents behave differently, and more intuitively: each page is its own image and shares almost nothing, so removing pages does reduce the file roughly in proportion. Either way, Compress PDF is the tool that targets size.

Frequently asked questions