Deleting documents and Sync Gateway

When we tend to delete documents from a bucket, we first stop the Sync Gateway and once the deletion is complete we restart it
Is this a good practice to follow or is there a better way to handle this?

As per one of the answer to this question,
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66203948/couchbase-deleted-documents-reappearing-in-database,
it says to purge the document. We have faced issues where after the deletion of the documents, the deleted documents would resurface in the Couchbase Server.

So would like to know whether we should only purge the document or delete it and then purge it?

You can delete documents in Sync Gateway or Couchbase Server without doing anything special. Deletes will be replicated to clients. Sync Gateway should remain online.

Purging documents is not required and can cause issues with replication as clients do not see purges.