How to Troubleshoot SharePoint 2013

A user emails you complaining about how SharePoint is broken. You click on the link they provided, and instead of going to the Community Site (in this example) it leads you to the following page error:

The error description may or may not help you troubleshoot the problem. In this example the page won’t render properly because “The server tag is not well formed”. One approach is to open SharePoint Designer and look at the underlying code of the offending page. But really, who wants to look through hundreds of lines of code trying to decipher what exactly is meant by “the server tag is not well formed”? Not me!

You click on “Technical Details” but you know that’s a waste of time. You then scratch your head and wonder what to do next. Here is one approach you can try:

1. Go up to the URL in your browser and delete everything from SitePages on. In the example above, if your URL were “contoso.com/atel/Community/SitePages/community.aspx”, you would delete “sitepages/community.aspx”. This will put you at the root of your site collection.
2. Now append the URL with “_layouts/15/settings.aspx”. Your URL will now look like this: “contoso.com/atel/community/_layouts/15/settings.aspx”. Hit return. If this brings up the Site Settings page of your site collection, then you can eliminate SharePoint Server as the culprit.
3. Now go to Settings > Site contents.

4. In the example below I am looking at the site contents for a community site:

5. Click through the different lists to see if they display their contents correctly.

If all the list data can be properly displayed, then most likely the default home page for the site collection got corrupted in some way, and it becomes a simple matter of recreating the page. Remember that SharePoint pages are templates that display data from lists. As long as the data is still intact and not corrupted, then it really is a simple matter of reassembling the different web parts to display the data. There are three ways you can recreate the page:

Option 1:
Replace the offending page with a copy of the same page from a similar site collection

1. Go back to your Site Settings page and select Content and Structure. If your site isn’t a Publishing site, you can always get to the Content and Structure page by going up to the URL and deleting everything to the right of your domain name and inserting /_layouts/15/sitemanager.aspx.

This will take you to a File Explorer view of your site:

2. Find a site template similar to the one you are troubleshooting. Clicking the site name will display the folders underneath the root of the site collection. Click on “Site Pages”.

3. Select the file you would like to copy, then under Actions, select Copy.

4. Save the file in the Site Pages folder of the site collection you are troubleshooting.
5. From the site collection you are troubleshooting, click on the file you just copied over. It should open and display the data from that site collection.
6. Delete the old file and then either:
   1. Rename the copied file to the old file name, or
   2. Update your navigation links to point to the new file name

Option 2:
Create a new page and insert the appropriate web parts

1. Go back to Site Contents > Site Pages and click on “new Wiki page”

2. Give it a name and click on “Create”. This will open a blank page in editing mode. At this point all you need to do is insert the appropriate Web Parts to re-create the corrupted page. This may or may not be a lot of work, depending upon how many different web parts there are. A better alternative may be Option 3.

Option 3:
Duplicate a page and use as a starting point

Sometimes it is easier to take a page that has most of the web parts you will be using and just duplicate it, then delete what you don’t need and add the web part(s) you do need.

Clicking through the site pages, we notice each page already has the Community tools, What’s happening, and Top contributors web parts.

We decide to use the About page.

1. Go to Site Settings > Content and structure
2. Select the Site Pages folder of the site you are troubleshooting
3. Right click “About” and select “Copy”

4. Copy the file to the Site Assets folder, click OK (SharePoint won’t allow you to copy a file to a folder that contains a file with the same name).
5. Allow SharePoint to perform the copy procedure. When it refreshes, you will be in the Site Assets folder.
6. Right click “About”, choose Edit Properties and change the name. Click Save.

7. Right click “Home Page” and select Move
8. Choose Site pages and click on OK.

9. Allow SharePoint to perform the move procedure. When it refreshes, you will be in the Site Pages folder.
10. Click on “Home Page” to open the page. Click Edit.

11. We want to delete the contents of the “Welcome to our community” section and insert a Discussions List Web part.

12. Save the file and see how it looks. The Discussions List should be displaying the correct list.

13. As a final housekeeping choir, from the Edit page, click on the Page tab, then click on Make Homepage. This will update the links to your site. Then you’re done!

What other ways do you use to troubleshoot SharePoint 2013?

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