What to Do When You Can’t Create Site Pages in SharePoint

Some settings in SharePoint don’t make a lot of sense. And sometimes they bite you.

There are a few little-known settings in the SharePoint Admin Center for pages.

These are tenant-level settings:

• Allow users to create modern pages
• Allow commenting on modern pages

By default, both settings are checked – they are enabled. The second one about commenting makes some sense: since comments are pretty much useless since they don’t go anywhere, turning them off across the tenant may make sense to you.

BUT, you may find that you can’t create a page from any Site Pages library. You’ll probably first notice it because when you click the +New button, you only see the Link option.

To make things even more confusing, if you are on the home page of any site (and have the permissions to do so), you’ll still see Page as an option when you click the +New button there. And, in fact, you can still create a page from there.

You’re most likely to notice this issue when you’ve added some custom Content Types to the Site Pages library. When you’ve done this, there’s no way to select the Contrnt Type from the dropdown, but even worse: you can’t change the Content Type in the Page details!

The reason for this annoyance is probably that someone on your admin team decided to uncheck the Allow users to create modern pages box. Given the effect the setting has, I can’t think of a single scenario where it would make sense to do this. Since you can, in fact create pages, anyway, there’s zero reason to uncheck that box.

Run over and tell your SharePoint Admin that and have them fix it for you!

Can you think of a scenario where unchecking the box makes sense? Please do tell!