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Deleting a SharePoint Subsite in Office 365

Toni Frankola - February 5, 2014

Some weeks ago I got this screenshot from an end user:

BP1_Site Contents - Windows Internet Explorer 2013-12-12 22.06.18

OK, I changed his red caption a little bit. The text was more similar to “How THE HELL do I delete this???”

You might be tempted to think that the delete button is just around the corner, but I actually had to send a couple of screenshots to my user in order to teach him how to do it.

Here are the steps:

Step 1: Navigate to the parent site of the subsite you want to delete. On the screenshot above it is called “Projects”.

Step 2: Go to “Site Contents” of the parent site by clicking the link in the left menu.

Step 3: Click “Settings” on the “Site Contents” page.

BP1_Site Contents - Windows Internet Explorer 2013-12-12 22.06.18_2

Step 4: On the “Settings” page, under “Site Administration” click “Sites and workspaces”.

BP1_Site Settings - Windows Internet Explorer 2013-12-12 22.22.07

Step 5: In “Sites and Workspaces” just click the “Delete” icon next to the subsite you want to delete.

BP1_Sites and Workspaces - Windows Internet Explorer 2013-12-12 22.23.57

Step 6: Confirm the action by clicking the “Delete” button at the bottom of the “Delete This Site” page.

BP1_Delete This Site - Windows Internet Explorer 2013-12-12 22.25.28

The subsite will be sent to the “Recycle Bin”, so you can recover it from there if necessary.

In some cases this seems like too much trouble, e.g. when you want to delete a subsite you created by accident and you just want to get rid of it. But I guess the assumption is that this is not a common use case of subsite deletion. The common scenario would be to delete a site on which you worked for days or months, and in that case maybe it’s not such a bad idea to go through all these steps.

Tags | delete-site, how-to, sharepoint-2013
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Toni Frankola

Entrepreneur, IT consultant, speaker, blogger, and geek. Co-founder of syskit.com.

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10 Responses

  • Fizzled January 20, 2015 at 10:40 pm

    Or, go to the Site Settings page of the subsite and click “Delete this site” under the Site Actions heading.

  • mcpdob February 3, 2015 at 4:52 am

    This setting was not available for us. The grey X in your picture is just missing. We had to choose delete site form site settings.

  • Kelly March 5, 2015 at 11:58 am

    Thanks for that it has worked. However my subsites are still showing on the sites list? But when they are clicked you get a 404 error. Any idea how to stop them appearing at all? Thanks

  • Francesca March 19, 2015 at 7:45 pm

    I’m playing with Team Sites for my company and created a few to see how it all works. I’ve tried or deleted a few of them…but they still show up on the default page (when I click on “SITES” in OWA)…if I click on them, it says site not found, but they still show up on the page.
    Please advise.

  • Bill May 4, 2015 at 7:36 pm

    Didn’t work for me – I don’t have any place to put a checkmark under the delete column. Very frustrating. Why do I have permission to create, but not delete? I’m the global administrator – doesn’t make sense.

  • Ken June 1, 2015 at 7:06 pm

    All good and well till step 5 – I don’t have the cross to delete sub-site. AFAIK I have full site administrator privileges as I set up all of our office 365 , SharePoint etc.

  • Jocelyn August 4, 2015 at 6:43 pm

    Great this worked! Thank you!

  • John Mc August 29, 2015 at 10:55 pm

    I’ve spent hours trying to figure out how to do this. Now, I realize I would have never figured it out. Thanks!

  • Brenda December 14, 2015 at 5:49 pm

    I followed these instructions (thank you so much) … but I do not have a delete icon .. there is the heading for delete, but does not allow me to delete a sub-site that I no longer want (actually created it in the wrong place).

  • sam January 19, 2017 at 10:31 pm

    This won’t work if the site you are trying to delete is below the first level of subsites of any site collection

  • Comments are closed.

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