How to delete a SharePoint site in 5 moves

SharePoint Online sites are the core of the digital workplace.

Companies invest significant amounts of time, money, energy and attention in building them.

Sometimes, however, they just want to get rid of them.
But how?

Here you will find steps to follow and alternative solutions.

How to delete a SharePoint Online site

SharePoint is Microsoft 365's platform for building dynamic, intuitive sites perfect for coordinating a company's people and activities.

From sharing information and documents in the cloud to the automation and customization possibilities of its components, a SharePoint site can be the turning point in a business's growth.

This is because it allows the tools and services that underlie the work of the teams, departments and locations that make up an organization to be brought together in a single digital space, while simplifying communication and collaboration between them.

It is no coincidence, in fact, that more and more companies are deciding to make substantial investments to equip themselves with their own central site-the intranet-to which vertical project and communication sites are then linked, to be dedicated to individual departments or special initiatives.

But you will already know these things.

If you have arrived here, it means that your company already has at least one SharePoint site and now, for one reason or another, wants to get rid of it.

Whether it is because of obsolescence, to reduce maintenance costs, or because of issues related to the security of stored data, the steps to get rid of your sites remain the same.

Let's look at them together in this article.

The 5 steps to follow to delete a SharePoint site

Before we begin, we need to clarify a very important aspect concerning erasing a SharePoint site.

Indeed, you must know that this is a potentially final and irreversible operation.

"Potentially" because it all depends on how long your site, as well as its individual contents, remain in the platform's recycle bin.

The latter is nothing more than a collection of items, equal to the many lists you will have worked with.

However, the trash collection has its own peculiar feature: the automatic countdown that inexorably leads to the total deletion of the items it contains.

It sounds drastic, and indeed it is.

Once the deadline passes, every trace of your site will disappear from the entire Microsoft 365 environment connected to your SharePoint tenant.

Consequently, we recommend that you make sure of two facts before transferring any information to the recycle bin:

1. The amount of time you have to eventually restore deleted content.
2. The actual uselessness of the data you want to delete

As for how long they stay in the recycle bin, this depends on the service plan your company subscribes to and the configuration of your SharePoint tenant.

In general, the platform retains deleted content for 93 days from the time it arrives in the recycle bin.

Nonetheless, this time frame can be reduced to as little as 30 days.

If you are a SharePoint admin, all you need to do is access the recycle bin settings to check how long you have before your data is completely deleted.

Regarding the second item on our list, however, the advice is to weigh the possibility that the site and content you want to delete may come in handy again in the future.

Often we don't dwell enough on the importance of retaining information and materials that now appear to be superfluous and cumbersome, but may instead prove to be critical to completing one of your team's next projects or to figure out how to improve the layout of your next corporate sites.

These are just examples, but the message is clear: you need to plan in detail for the management of your sites, including whether they should be closed down temporarily or permanently.

One alternative we propose over simply deleting a site is to back it up.

In this way, you can free up useful space in your digital workspace, while still having the ability to restore entire archives, security configurations, and custom graphics.

After this long but necessary introduction, we present below the 5 steps to follow to delete a SharePoint site:

1. Log into Microsoft 365.

Enter your account credentials and log in to the main interface.

2. Open SharePoint.

Use Microsoft 365 search or browse through the list of apps offered until you find the SharePoint one.

Select it to get to the platform's home page.

3. Access the settings for the site you want to delete.

From the SharePoint home page, scroll down the list of sites you have access to and select the one you are interested in.

Once you get to the site's home page, click on the settings wheel and select the "Site Content" item.

4. Delete the information that the site contains.

In the "Site Contents" section, you will find all the document libraries, lists and pages that make up the site.

Now, you will have to select the ones you are interested in and delete them one by one.

Yes, unfortunately, the platform does not provide a blanket deletion for its sites. But with good reason.

This mechanism has a protective function, preventing you or your colleagues and associates from deleting important company data. Perhaps because you did not remember that it was stored on that very site.

To delete lists and document libraries, simply click on the three dots beside each item and select "Delete."

To delete pages, on the other hand, go into the folder named "sitepages," click on the little circle that will appear as you hover your cursor in overview next to the items, and proceed with the deletion.

5. Delete the site.

After you have patiently emptied your site of all its contents (libraries, lists, pages, etc.), you can move it to the trash.

As we anticipated, you will have a set amount of time to restore individual contents or the entire structure before SharePoint deletes them permanently.

We don't want to burden your reading, but you know: repetita iuvant.

To finish with the total deletion of the site, click on the scroll wheel in the upper right-hand corner, go to the "Site Information" item and select the "Delete" command for the last time.

What permissions are needed to delete a SharePoint site

Having seen how to go about deleting a SharePoint Online site, we want to delve into two topics that are good to know to avoid panicking when the steps listed just now don't work.

The first, as the title suggests, concerns user permissions; the second, which we will cover in the next chapter, refers to some special cases in which a site cannot be deleted.

Following the program of our talk, let us, therefore, start with permissions.

To ensure maximum security and organization of content, SharePoint has a multi-level system of permissions, which are assigned to groups of users and can apply to different sites.

For more on the structure of permissions, we refer you to our article on
SharePoint and its 7 main features.

When deleting a site, the user must either re-enter the tenant's administration group or the owner group of the specific site.

Owners have "Full Control" type permission, which allows them to manage settings and activities affecting one of the sites in the tenant. Among the activities, falls the deletion of individual content and the site itself.

For their part, SharePoint admins have control over the corporate tenant, that is, over an organization's entire collection of sites.

Consequently, they have all the permissions made available by the platform, so they have no problem creating, editing, deleting or restoring sites in the collection.

If you are in doubt as to whether or not you belong to these two groups, it only takes a little checking.

Specifically, you will need to:

1. Enter SharePoint.
2. Open the site of your interest.
3. Click the scroll wheel in the upper right-hand corner.
4. Select the "Site permissions" item.
5. Check which permissions have been granted and to whom.

In case you do not have the necessary permissions, there are two options: delegate the task to an admin or owner user, or ask them to give you permission to delete the site.

Simple so far, isn't it?

So let's move on to the next topic.