It's finally here! I have waited for this feature since I first saw it in a demo at #ESPC18 in Copenhagen: Change the URL on an existing site in Office365. A much wanted feature! We have been able to do this on prem since forever, and now it is finally arrived in my tenant.
You know when you create a site and then want to change the URL because the naming was incorrect or maybe the purpose of the site has changed and sometimes it is important that the URL fits it's purpose.
Now in the Office365 SharePoint Admin Center that option is finally there! Go ahead and select your site, click on the i-button and there it should be an "Edit" link. Cool.
As a global or SharePoint admin in your organization, you can change the URL for the following types of sites (previously called "site collections"):
- Office 365 group-connected team sites
- Modern team sites that don't belong to an Office 365 group
- Communication sites
- Classic team sites
Tried it on a site where I want to remove the "2" from the URL and this site is a hub site. You will see this message:
And then it does not allow you to change the URL, for obvious reasons - the associated sites would loose their connection to the hub site. So first unregister the site as a hub site - this will automatically disassociate all the associated sites. And don't worry, when you register it as a hub later again the sites will automatically be associated back to the hub. So you don't have to remember what sites that were associated:
Now let's try it again. This time it asks you to type in the new URL:
I will just remove the "2" from the URL and then hit OK. Next question pops up. Do you want to enter a new site name? If you do, press OK, but my site name was already correct. I noticed on another site, when doing this and changing the site name that it was reflected on the site it self, but in the Admin center it still shows my old site name in the "Active sites" view.
Now register the site as a hub again. Click on the link to try it. It works just fine!
If you try to go to the old URL, then you will automatically be redirected to the new URL.
The only thing I noticed was that in my mega menu, I had the old URL, and if I clicked on that I came into the site but the URL was not redirecting in the address field... still worked though? Strange. Therefore, you may have to edit the links in the mega menu so they point to the new correct URL.
Now I wanted to try to add a new site on the old URL. Because maybe you changed the site URL from IT to IT-team or similar. Then you may want to use the IT for another site. Maybe it's because the indexing was not ready yet or so, but my site got a number in the URL when I created a new site on the old URL. So WitGirls22 instead of Witgirls2. If I had used IT then it would have given me the URL IT2 probably.
