Reusing A Deleted SharePoint Online Team Site Name

I have deleted a SharePoint Team Site (O365), Now I am trying to create Communications Site with the same URL (name) as the SharePoint Team Site that I deleted. (For example https://sp.sharepoint.com/sites/SPadmin)

 

Site is getting created with the appended name “2” after the site name.

 

This article will replicate the same scenario and fix it step by step.

• Creating a team site from the tenant, go to portal https://admin.microsoft.com/Adminportal select SharePoint from Admin center.
• Click on active sites and create a new team site as shown in the below screenshot. Follow the steps as given below.

• As soon as you are clicking on the Team Site template, you will be redirected to the page where you need to fill site details and click on create.

• Clicking next will start provisioning the site, which will be ready to use in a few minutes.
• You can check in Active site page that site will be ready to use. See below, site is ready to use

• Now for some reason or business requirement, we need to delete this site. We will perform this deletion of this site from the Admin center or we can go to site information (gearbox, select site info and delete this site) and can delete the same. Now I am proceeding to delete this site from the admin center and recycle bin.

• Once the site is deleted, we will create a new site selecting the same template or other template and see is it allowing us to create with the same name which we just have deleted.
• We can see that it’s not giving the desired name before we create it, see below for more info.

• It’s clear that the deleted site still exists on our tenant, which doesn’t allow us to create a site with the same name.

How to resolve

• We need to use online Powershell to fix the same.
• Open SharePoint Online Management shell, and connect your tenant which does have SA permission
• Once connected, Use Get-SPODeletedsite command see, below, it will result in showing you all the deleted sites.

• We have to remove this site from here as well, to reuse the deleted site name as URL.
• Use Remove-spodeletedsite – identity SiteURL or id see below for more details

 

Now, we will try to create a site with the same name and see how it’s going following the same steps as we did above. Go to admin center > Active Site > create > select Template.

• You can see that the desired name is available now and we can reuse the same.