How to Disable SharePoint Designer using PowerShell?

SharePoint Designer 2013 is a great free tool from Microsoft to customize SharePoint sites and create workflows. Why should we disable SharePoint designer? Well, In some cases, site owners and designers may damage SharePoint with this Powerful utility, and I’ve seen SharePoint designers become SharePoint destroyers! So, to prevent irreversible damage to SharePoint, we decided to disable the SharePoint designer.

Since there is no upgrade to SharePoint Designer, SharePoint Designer 2013 continues to support creating and modifying SharePoint sites, pages, and workflows for SharePoint 2016 and SharePoint Online environments.

How to disable SharePoint designer in SharePoint 2013 or SharePoint 2016?

You can disable Microsoft SharePoint Designer at the Web application and site collection levels.

Disable SharePoint designer at the central administration
To disable SharePoint designer from the central administration site, for a web application, follow these steps:

  1. Go to SharePoint 2016 central Administration site >> Click on Application management
  2. Click on Manage web applications >> Select your target Web application to disable SharePoint designer
  3. Click on the General settings drop-down from the ribbon and select SharePoint Designer.
    sharepoint 2013 disable sharepoint designer powershell
  4. Unselect all check boxes (or whatever applicable to you) and hit OK to save!

To allow the SharePoint designer to be used in this web application, revert the above steps by ticking all checkboxes.

SharePoint 2016: Disable SharePoint Designer with PowerShell for a Web Application

Let’s disable SharePoint Designer 2013 using PowerShell.

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

#Get the Web Application
$webApp = Get-SPWebApplication -Identity "https://intranet.crescent.com"

#Disable SharePoint Designer
$webApp.AllowDesigner = $False
$webApp.AllowRevertFromTemplate = $False
$webApp.AllowMasterPageEditing = $False
$webApp.ShowURLStructure = $False

$webApp.Update()

Disable SharePoint designer at the site collection

SharePoint has the ability to disable SharePoint Designer at the individual site collection level. Here is how to disable the SharePoint designer for a site collection.

  1. Login to your SharePoint 2016 or SharePoint Online site collection as an administrator.
  2. Click on Site Settings gear >> Select Site Settings.
  3. Under Site Collection Administration, select SharePoint Designer Settings.
  4. Unselect all the options listed.
    disable sharepoint designer site collection powershell

So from now, SharePoint Designer will be disabled for all users, including Site collection Administrators! As this is at the site collection level, you’ll have to repeat these steps for each site collection!

Disable SharePoint designer for site collection using PowerShell

Here is the PowerShell to disable SharePoint designer at the site collection level:

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

#Get the site
$Site = Get-SPSite "https://intranet.crescent.com/sites/sales"

#Disable SharePoint Designer
$Site.AllowDesigner = $False
$Site.AllowRevertFromTemplate = $False
$Site.AllowMasterPageEditing = $False
$Site.ShowURLStructure = $False 

This Stops SharePoint Designer from changing code! To enable SharePoint designer using PowerShell, set the $False flags to $True.

#Disable SharePoint Designer on to all site collections
Get-SPSite -Limit All | ForEach-Object {
    $Site.AllowDesigner = $False
}

How to enable or disable SharePoint designer in SharePoint Online? Refer to my other post: How to Enable or Disable SharePoint designer in SharePoint Online?

Salaudeen Rajack

Salaudeen Rajack - Information Technology Expert with Two-decades of hands-on experience, specializing in SharePoint, PowerShell, Microsoft 365, and related products. He has held various positions including SharePoint Architect, Administrator, Developer and consultant, has helped many organizations to implement and optimize SharePoint solutions. Known for his deep technical expertise, He's passionate about sharing the knowledge and insights to help others, through the real-world articles!

2 thoughts on “How to Disable SharePoint Designer using PowerShell?

  • Your single Site Collection code seems to be twisted: Disabling by setting to $true ?

    Reply

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