Automatically find and delete empty pages — perfect for scanned documents
Blank pages creep into PDFs almost every time a document passes through a scanner. They pad out the file, break the flow when someone reads it on screen, and waste paper and toner when the document goes to print. This free tool finds every empty page automatically and removes them in one pass — no page numbers to type in, no manual checking, and no software to install.
Duplex scanning is the biggest culprit by far. A double-sided scanner captures the back of every sheet whether or not anything was printed on it, so a thirty-page single-sided report arrives as a sixty-page PDF with every alternate page empty. Chapter breaks in books and manuals deliberately leave the reverse of a section divider blank so the next chapter opens on a right-hand page — useful in print, pointless on screen. Merged documents collect the trailing blank pages of every file that went into them. Fax and multi-function printer output often adds an empty cover or trailer page to each transmission. Word and Excel exports frequently tack on a stray final page created by a paragraph mark or print range that spilled past the last row of content.
A page can look blank to you and still contain hidden data, so a single test is not enough. Every page runs through three checks in sequence. The first extracts the text layer and asks whether a single character exists. The second lists the embedded image objects. Only when both come back completely empty does the third check run: the page is rendered to a grayscale bitmap and the tool counts what fraction of pixels are darker than pure white. A page is marked blank only when it fails all three. This layered approach is what stops the tool from deleting a page that holds nothing but a page number, a thin footer line, or a small watermark.
Real scans are rarely pure white. Paper texture, dust on the glass, the shadow along a book spine, and bleed-through from the reverse side all leave faint marks that a naive detector would count as content. The sensitivity slider tells the tool how much of that noise to forgive.
The default of 0.2% handles most documents correctly. Push it toward 0.5–1% when working with old paper, low-quality scans, or pages with visible speckle and edge shadows. Pull it down to 0.05% when your PDF was generated digitally rather than scanned, and you want to be certain that only genuinely empty pages are touched.
The Scan First button reads your document and reports exactly which page numbers it would delete, without modifying anything. This takes a couple of seconds and eliminates the risk of losing a page you wanted to keep. If the list surprises you, move the sensitivity slider and scan again until the result matches your expectation — then click remove with confidence.
Offices digitising paper archives strip out thousands of duplex-scan backs in a single step. Students and academics clean up scanned journal articles and textbook chapters before annotating them. Legal and administrative teams tidy bundled case files so the page count matches the index. Print shops remove wasted sheets before a run to cut paper and toner costs. Anyone emailing a document reduces the file size and makes the result look deliberate rather than sloppy.
Every blank page in a scanned PDF still carries a full-page image behind it — often several hundred kilobytes of nothing. Removing forty of them can cut the file size dramatically, which matters when you are attaching the document to an email with a size limit or uploading it over a slow connection. If you need to go further, our Compress PDF tool reduces the size of the remaining pages too.
Your PDF is processed entirely in memory and discarded the moment your download finishes. Nothing is written to disk, nothing is logged, and no copy is kept. The tool runs in any modern browser on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS with no app to install and no account to create.
Need finer control? Delete Pages lets you remove specific page numbers by hand, Organize PDF gives you a visual grid to rotate, reorder, and delete pages together, and Split PDF separates a long document into smaller files.