Delete sites & subsites
Bulk recycle or remove
Every site and subsite in one table, so a tenant clean-up is one screen rather than a hundred trips through the admin centre. Tick any mix, see what each one is costing you in storage, and move them to the recycle bin or remove them outright.
What it does
- What sites and subsites exist, in one table, with their URLs.
- How big each one is, calculated on demand and cached so the second look is instant.
- Exactly which URLs a run affected, kept for 90 days afterwards.
How it runs
- Sign in. Tenant-wide listing needs the SharePoint administrator role.
- Review the table. Tick any mix of sites and subsites. Sizes are calculated when you ask for them, because calculating every site up front would make the page unusable.
- Choose recycle or permanent. Recycle is the default. Permanent applies to site collections and asks twice.
- Confirm, then it runs. The confirmation states the count and the URLs. Cancel offers Finish the current item, Stop now, or Keep running. Nothing is left half-written: an item is either done or not started.
How it works
Only the rows you tick are deleted. Ticking a site does not tick its subsites, and a row without a known address is dropped rather than guessed at. The ticked rows are put in order deepest first, so a ticked subsite is handled before a ticked site above it. On a trial licence the run acts on only the first few ticked rows and says so.
A subsite is always moved to its site collection's recycle bin, whichever mode you chose; there is no permanent delete for a subsite. A site collection in recycle mode is moved to the tenant's Deleted sites, where it can be restored from the SharePoint admin centre, and the run waits for SharePoint to confirm the move before counting it. In permanent mode a site collection is first moved to Deleted sites and, only once that is confirmed, purged from there. If the move cannot be confirmed, nothing is purged. If the move worked but the purge failed, the site is reported as still in Deleted sites and still restorable.
SharePoint will not recycle a subsite that still has subsites of its own. The run never cascades on its own initiative: after the first pass it lists the subsites refused for that reason and asks whether to recycle each of them together with every subsite beneath it, deepest first. If you decline, they stay where they are and are reported as failed. If the retry fails too, its own reason is shown on that row.
Sites are deleted one at a time. A site that fails is recorded with SharePoint's reason and the run moves on to the next; if the connection drops, the run waits between sites rather than failing them one after another. Every run, including one that was stopped or ended abnormally, is written to the site deletion history on this computer with the mode and the exact URLs that were deleted and that failed, and deleted rows are removed from the table.
What you need
- SharePoint administrator to list the tenant and to delete site collections. Subsites need site collection administrator on their parent.
What it will not do
- Deleting a site takes its subsites, its content and its permissions with it.
- A recycled site collection is restorable from the admin centre for about 93 days. A permanently deleted one is not restorable at all.
- A site connected to a Microsoft 365 group behaves differently from a standalone one. Deleting the site does not delete the group.