Unable to edit default.aspx pages in SharePoint Online as of July 1st, 2024

Question

I am a SharePoint Site Collection Administrator for my department (not a full SharePoint Admin for our tenant), and have been for the last 11 years. Our organization has been using SharePoint for approximately 20 years, and we moved to SharePoint Online in O365 a few years ago. We have not had any trouble until last week.

Due to the age of our site, our site collection is structured such that default.aspx is our homepage for the main site and all of our dozens of subsites (i.e. xxxxx.sharepoint.com/sites/mainsite/default.aspx and xxxxx.sharepoint.com/sites/mainsite/subsite/default.aspx). This is in contrast to how things operate now in the new experience, where the default homepage for a site is SitePages/Home.aspx.

This use of default.aspx has not been a problem until July 1st, 2024, when I came to work to learn that, not only could users with Full Control of a subsite no longer edit the default.aspx page in their subsite, but Site Collection Administrators could not edit any default.aspx pages across the entire site collection. To make matters worse, even our global SharePoint Admins cannot edit default.aspx pages in any of the site collections across our tenant. The Edit Page icon (as well as nearly all other icons) are simply grayed out.

Pages that are found in SitePages libraries remain editable, as do team sites in the modern experience.

Has anyone else experienced this? If so, how can this be fixed?

Answer 1

Based on your post, I understand that the default page used to be home page in all site collection includes sub sites cannot be edited, even use site collection administrator account and SharePoint admin account. Is it right? If it is wrong, please correct me.

1.Check the default page whether has unique permissions.

2.Make sure the default page is checked out, published and approved.

3.Switch to the modern experience, then try to edit the default page.

4.Clear the browser cache or use another browser to edit the default page.

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Answer 2

It is as I suspected: The disabling of custom scripts (a setting available in the SharePoint Admin portal) is what caused the inability to edit default.aspx pages. The link below has all the information for the change:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/allow-or-prevent-custom-script

Our admins have temporarily allowed custom scripts, which resolved our issue. However, it will not be a long-term solution, so we will begin migrating our pages over to the SitePages library.

@Sheila Hill we have not yet begun the migration, but we at least have the cause.

Answer 3

I think we may have identified the culprit. It seems that custom scripts are now prevented from being run in our tenant. It appears that default.aspx is seen as a master or template page, which is not allowed be edited. I'll work with our admins to migrate our default.aspx pages over to sitepages/home.aspx pages.