Delete a Site Collection Permanently in SharePoint Online

Posted by Khoa Quach

This is a quick guide on how to permanently delete a site collection in SharePoint Online. Let’s say that you created a site collection using the SharePoint admin center only to realize soon after that what you actually need is a communication site using the same URL. This is obviously not the ideal case – you would still need to migrate assets from the old site to the new site – but what if you really need it to work out?

Here is How

The obvious way to perform the delete action would be to connect to the SharePoint admin center via the web, select the site collection, and hit “Delete” from the ribbon. Then you could create the new site from SharePoint using the URL that you just freed up.

Unfortunately, that route is not recommended because when you delete the site collection, it just ends up in the recycle bin. This means the site will be available for a 30 day period after you’ve deleted it in case you wanted to restore it. It is a nice precaution, but not when you want the site collection truly gone.

If you don’t want to wait those 30 days, you will have to use the SharePoint Online Management Shell in order to run remove-spodeletedsite cmdlet.

Just open the SharePoint Online Management Shell and run the following commands:

• Connect-SPOService -Url https://tenant-admin.sharepoint.com -credential [email protected]
• Remove-SPODeletedSite -Identity https://tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/tobedeleted
• Confirm [Y] or [A]

Then you should be done!

Then you should be done! Hope you enjoy and let me know if you have any question.

Here at NIFTIT, from Office 365 consulting to SharePoint solutions, we can handle projects of any size and difficulty. We follow industry standards and best practices to build world-class solutions. learn more about our services here!