Scenario: IT lead at a 600-person financial services consultancy following a corporate merger and rebrand
| Scenario element | Details |
|---|---|
| Organisation | 600-person financial services consultancy |
| Trigger | Merger with a smaller firm; full rebrand to new company name and domain |
| Problem | 4,200+ stale links across 80 SharePoint sites referencing the old name and domain |
| Content types affected | Site Pages, document library columns, list items, News posts, site navigation |
| Persona | Kirra, IT lead (solo), 12 weeks to complete rebrand cutover |
| Resolution | Replace Master across all 80 sites in two working days |
The Situation
Kirra's firm had operated under the Meridan Consulting name for eleven years. When the merger completed, the new entity rebranded under a new name with a new SharePoint tenant domain. An external consultant handled the technical tenant migration, but the content cleanup landed with Kirra.
The problem was links. Every internal SharePoint page that linked to another SharePoint page used the old domain in the URL. Project management lists linked to document libraries by their old URLs, and site page news posts embedded images and document links that still pointed at the old structure. The company-wide org chart linked to every department site using old paths. Eighty active sites had accumulated eleven years of internal cross-links, and not one of them updated automatically when the tenant name changed.
Kirra catalogued forty distinct string patterns requiring replacement: the old company name in two capitalisation variants, the old tenant domain, five legacy project-site URL prefixes, several formatted versions of the company name appearing in document metadata columns, and the old company email domain appearing in contact information lists. The mandate from the executive team was clear: by the go-live date, no employee should encounter a broken or incorrectly branded link anywhere in SharePoint.
The Four Categories of Stale Content
| Content type | Why it was stale | Volume estimate |
|---|---|---|
| Site Page body content | Inline links, image src attributes, and embedded document links used old domain URLs | Hundreds of pages across 80 sites |
| List and library column values | Hyperlink columns and text columns stored the old company name or old portal URLs | Thousands of list items |
| Site navigation | Quick Launch and top navigation bars contained hard-coded links to old site paths | Every site with custom navigation |
| News posts | News posts published under the old brand contained old logos, links, and name references | Dozens of posts per active communications site |
Why Manual Editing Was Not Viable
The first thing Kirra did was open a few of the worst-affected sites and try the manual approach. A Site Page with ten internal links takes around eight minutes to update by hand: open the page in edit mode, find each link, correct the URL, save, and republish. With dozens of affected pages per site across eighty sites, the manual path projected to several hundred hours of work. That was more than Kirra's entire available time before go-live, leaving nothing for testing, communication, or anything else.
SharePoint's built-in search-and-replace does not exist at the site or tenant level. The Microsoft 365 admin centre has no tool for bulk content replacement across sites. PowerShell can update list column values through PnP SharePoint, but writing custom scripts to handle forty string patterns across eighty sites, with proper handling of Site Pages, rich-text content, and navigation elements, was itself a significant project risk.
"I estimated two to three weeks just to write and test the PowerShell safely. And if a script ran wrong across eighty sites at once, the rollback would have been a disaster."
Kirra also considered assigning the manual editing work to members of each department's site owner team. This would distribute the labour but add weeks of coordination, inconsistent results, and no audit trail of what had been updated and what had been missed.
See how Replace Master handles bulk find and replace across SharePoint
Running the Find-and-Replace Pass with Replace Master
Kirra started with a discovery scan. Replace Master connected to each of the eighty sites and indexed the text content of Site Pages, list columns, and library metadata fields. The scan returned a full match list for each of the forty replacement patterns, showing the affected site, page or list item, and the exact context around each match. The discovery output made it possible to triage before touching anything.
A small number of sites had zero matches. Several legacy project archive sites had matches in old documents that were intentionally being left in a read-only archive state; Kirra excluded those from the replacement scope. For the remaining sixty-two active sites, she configured the replacement operations in priority order: old tenant domain URLs first (highest breakage risk if missed), then the old company name in plain text, then formatted variants in column metadata.
Replace Master processed each find-and-replace pass across all in-scope sites, updating Site Pages and republishing them, updating list column values, and recording a log of every change made. The entire pass across the sixty-two sites took just under two working days. Kirra ran a second discovery scan afterwards to confirm no matches remained for any of the forty patterns. The second scan returned zero results.
What Would Have Broken Without This Process
Broken navigation links are the most visible failure mode. A site's Quick Launch or top navigation bar with hard-coded old URLs produces a 404 error for every employee who clicks it on go-live day. Help desk tickets follow immediately.
Stale document metadata is less visible but causes longer-term confusion. If a document library's "Client Portal" column still contains old portal URLs, users who click those values arrive at broken or incorrectly branded destinations weeks or months after go-live, when someone finally uses the field.
Embedded content in Site Pages is the hardest to find manually. A Site Page built with Text and Image web parts may contain dozens of inline links and image source attributes that do not appear in any column view. Without scanning page body content directly, these links are invisible until a user navigates to the page and clicks something. All three categories were present in Kirra's eighty-site estate.
Ongoing Content Hygiene After Go-Live
Running a second discovery scan to verify zero matches was only the beginning of Kirra's post-go-live hygiene process. New content created by employees during the transition period sometimes contained old branding because users were copying from old templates or emails. Kirra scheduled a follow-up scan four weeks after go-live to catch anything that had slipped through.
She also used the discovery results from the first scan to identify which teams had produced the highest volume of stale content. Those teams received targeted communication about updating their document templates and email signatures. Addressing the source of new stale content prevented the same cleanup from being needed again after the next company change.
For a detailed look at the SharePoint content types Replace Master can reach, including lists and libraries, see the guide to auditing SharePoint site permissions for context on the admin access required to operate across multiple sites.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can SharePoint handle bulk URL replacement across sites natively?
No. SharePoint Online has no built-in tenant-level or site-level find-and-replace. The Microsoft 365 admin centre does not offer this capability. PnP PowerShell can update list item columns but does not handle Site Page rich-text content or navigation elements. Bulk content replacement across a multi-site estate requires a purpose-built tool or custom scripting with significant development effort.
Does Replace Master update Site Page version history when replacing text?
Yes. Replace Master updates and republishes Site Pages, creating a new version in the page's version history. The pre-replacement version is retained, so admins can review what changed or revert to the earlier version if needed.
What types of SharePoint content can Replace Master search and replace?
Replace Master works across SharePoint document libraries, lists, and Site Pages. It can find and replace text in list column values, rich-text fields, and Site Page body content. It targets SharePoint Online content and metadata; it does not modify the content inside binary files such as Word documents or PDFs stored in libraries.