Microsoft has drawn a line in the sand for SharePoint’s older technology, setting a 2027 deadline to begin retiring SharePoint classic features and pushing organizations firmly toward the platform’s modern experience.
According to Neowin’s reporting on the announcement, the rollout comes in two distinct phases. New publishing sites will be disabled starting in 2027, while existing user-created pages built on the classic experience are slated to become read-only in 2028.
What SharePoint classic features are being retired
The headline change targets SharePoint publishing sites — the template-based sites that let content authors build marketing-style pages with rich formatting, custom navigation, and editorial workflows. Starting in 2027, Microsoft will stop allowing organizations to create new publishing sites under the classic model.
The second phase, landing in 2028, is more restrictive: pages that users have already created using the classic experience will be locked into read-only mode. That means content authors won’t be able to edit, restructure, or republish those pages once the transition takes effect.
For anyone currently running a classic publishing site, the practical upshot is that the clock is already ticking on both new builds and ongoing edits to existing ones.
The classic-to-modern shift
To understand the impact, it helps to know how SharePoint has evolved. The classic experience dates back to SharePoint’s earlier generations, built around server-rendered pages, classic web parts, and the original site templates that defined the platform for over a decade.
Microsoft introduced its modern experience over several years, shipping a cleaner, responsive interface, the SharePoint Framework (SPFx) for custom development, and a much lighter set of built-in features. The goal has been to move every tenant off the heavier classic architecture onto a more maintainable, cloud-first platform.
This retirement is the latest step in that long migration. Microsoft has been nudging organizations toward modern sites for years, and the 2027/2028 dates formalize what was previously a softer recommendation into a hard deadline.
Why Microsoft is forcing the issue
Feature retirement isn’t new to SharePoint — Microsoft has retired dozens of capabilities over the years, from classic web parts to legacy authentication methods. The pattern exists because maintaining parallel code paths is expensive, and older technologies often lag on security, performance, and mobile support.
By retiring classic publishing sites, Microsoft is consolidating support onto the modern experience, which reduces the maintenance burden and gives users a single, consistent interface. It also aligns with the broader strategy of steering enterprise collaboration toward cloud-native tools like Microsoft 365 groups, Teams, and OneDrive.
What this means for you
If you or your organization rely on classic SharePoint publishing sites, this is a change you’ll need to plan for rather than ignore. The two-phase timeline means there’s a window to act, but it closes fast.
Content authors on classic sites will lose editing ability once the 2028 read-only phase takes effect, so any pages you depend on daily should be reviewed now. Teams building new sites should start from modern site templates instead of the classic publishing option.
What to do before the deadline
First, inventory every classic publishing site in your tenant and note which ones are in active use. Next, evaluate whether the content can be migrated to a modern site — Microsoft has provided migration tools and guidance for moving pages, libraries, and structure across.
For anything that can’t be fully replicated in the modern experience, plan for how it will be maintained once it goes read-only. Because the exact dates and any edge-case exemptions can shift, treat the 2027 and 2028 milestones as firm targets and start the migration work well ahead of them.
As always with large-scale platform changes like this, watch Microsoft’s official channels for the final, authoritative guidance on the timeline and any affected editions.
Source: Neowin
Over to you: Are you still running a classic SharePoint publishing site, or have you already migrated to modern?
