The report is 27 pages long. Three of them are adverts at the front, one is a terms page at the back, and two in the middle are blank backs from a double-sided scan. You need to send it to a client, and you don't want to send them the adverts, the blank pages, or the terms they'll never read.

Here is the short version of how to delete pages in a PDF. Open it in a tool that shows you every page, mark the ones you don't want, and download a new file built from the pages you kept. The free Delete Pages from PDF tool does exactly that in your browser: no signup, no upload, and the pages you remove are really gone, not just hidden.

How to delete pages from a PDF in five steps

  1. Drop the file in. Every page shows up as a preview, so you're choosing by sight, not by number.
  2. Click the pages you want to remove and they turn red. If you already know the numbers, type them instead, for example 1, 3, 5-7.
  3. Clear out the blank pages, if there are any. Click Find blank pages and every page that looks blank is marked for you. Check them first, and click any you want to keep.
  4. Click Delete pages. The tool builds a new PDF from the pages you kept.
  5. Download the new file. It shows the size before and after, so you can see what the missing pages were worth.

Your original stays untouched on your device. The download is a new copy, which matters more than it sounds: if you delete the wrong page, you just start again from the original.

Typing the numbers beats tapping

Clicking thumbnails is fine for one or two pages. For anything bigger, typing wins. Say your 27-page report has adverts on pages 1 to 3, blank backs on 6, 12 and 18, and terms on page 27. Type 1-3, 6, 12, 18, 27 and you're left with 20 pages in one move.

Ranges work the same way. To drop everything after page 40 of a long manual, type the range and be done. The one mistake to watch for is the off-by-one: the page that looks like page 5 in your viewer might be page 6 in the file if there's a cover sheet you forgot about. Glance at the thumbnails before you press delete, not after.

The blank backs from a double-sided scan

This is the job the tool is best at, and the one most guides skip. When single-sided sheets go through a double-sided scanner, every second page comes out blank. A 12-page contract becomes 24 pages, half of them empty.

Find blank pages handles it in one click, and it has two settings. Nearly empty sweeps up pages holding nothing but dust, specks, a page number, or one of those "this page intentionally left blank" notes. Completely empty is stricter: only pages with no marks whatsoever. Even one short heading on a page keeps it off the list.

It judges each page against that page's own paper colour, so yellowed scans still work, and it ignores the shadow creeping in at the edges. Faint pencil is the edge case: the checker can read a lightly pencilled page as empty. So look through the marked pages before you press delete. Nothing goes until you say so.

Deleted means gone, not hidden

There's a difference worth knowing. Some tools that remove pages from a PDF only hide them. The pages stop showing, but their text and images are still sitting in the file, and anyone who knows where to look can read them.

This tool writes a fresh file containing only the pages you kept. Whatever was on the deleted pages, text, photos, all of it, simply isn't in that file. That's the whole point when the reason for deleting a page is that someone shouldn't see it. A confidential appendix. A page with someone's personal details. A draft section that was never meant to leave your desk.

Same rule applies to the rest of the file before you share it. If the PDF still carries the author's name, the software it was made in, or GPS data from a scanned photo, that travels with it too. Removing the metadata takes a minute and is worth doing on anything you send outside your own team.

What it won't do

Three limits, stated plainly, because they decide whether this is the right tool.

Password-protected PDFs. An encrypted PDF can't be edited directly, and the tool tells you so instead of handing you a broken file, which is the polite version of refusing. Open the file with its password in your PDF viewer, print it to a new PDF, and use that copy. The password stays with the original; the copy is clean.

Bookmarks and form fields don't survive. They live at the document level, not on any one page, so they don't come along to the new file. What stays behind looks untouched, but a fillable form will come out flat, and a bookmarked report will lose its bookmarks.

You can't delete every page. A PDF with zero pages isn't a PDF, so the tool always leaves you at least one. And the page numbers printed on the pages don't renumber themselves: if the original says page 4 followed by page 7, it still will. If that matters, add fresh numbers afterwards with the PDF page numbers tool. If the order is wrong as well as the content, fix both at once in the Organize PDF tool, which reorders and rotates pages in the same place.

Check the new file before you send it

Deleting the wrong page is easy to do and easy to miss, because thumbnails are small. Take one minute. Count the pages: if the original had 27 and you removed 7, the new file should have 20. Scroll through it in a normal viewer, not just the thumbnails. And check the pages either side of a deleted block, because that's where mistakes usually hide.

Questions people ask

Can I delete pages from a PDF on my phone?

Yes. The tool runs in a mobile browser and the thumbnails work with touch. They're small, so zoom in before deciding on a page you can't quite read, and use the page number box for large ranges instead of tapping each page. Check the downloaded file in your phone's PDF viewer before sharing it.

Can I delete pages from a scanned PDF?

Yes, and this is where the blank-page finder earns its keep. A scanned page is just an image of a page, and deleting it works the same as deleting any other page. If the scan is crooked rather than unwanted, don't delete and rescan it: straighten it instead.

Will deleting pages make the file smaller?

It depends what was on the pages you removed. Deleting a few text pages barely moves the size. Deleting full-page photos, scanned images or a heavy appendix can cut it by a lot, because the new file is built only from the pages you kept. If the file is still too big for an upload limit after deleting, the pages left are the heavy ones, and that's a compression job, not a deletion job.

Can I delete half a page?

No. Deleting works on whole pages. If only part of a page needs to go, that's a different job: crop the page to trim its edges, or redact the passage so it's removed for good while the page stays.

One last thing, and it's the one people get wrong. Don't strip pages from a document that has to be submitted complete. A bank statement, a certificate, a legal record: removing pages can make it look altered and get it rejected. If you only want the other person to see part of it, keep the full version yourself and send the shortened copy as an extra, with a note saying what you removed. The tool makes deletion easy. Deciding what is safe to delete is still your call.