[sharepoint] How to edit default.aspx on SharePoint site without SharePoint Designer

On several occations, I have faced the situation that the default.aspx page on a Site doesn't work. More specifically, a reference to a WebPart and/or Control is throwing a error because the assembly is not found. Fine, you just fire up the dreaded SharePoint Designer and remove the dependency line. However, if I wanted to use this method when not having SharePoint Designer, how could this be done?

EDIT: Removing the web part using the "?contents=1" web part management page didn't help in my case. The <%@Register tag was still there and had to be removed using SharePoint Designer.

This question is related to sharepoint sharepoint-designer

The answer is


Or you could just open the page in maintenance mode and delete the offending web part.

Sharepoint 2007 Insight: Remove bad or broken web parts from a page


Easy quick solution which worked for me. 1. Go to the root folder. Copy the default.aspx file. 2. Delete the original file. 3. Rename the copied file to default.aspx.

Its all set to experiment again. Not sure how sharepoint referencing these webparts in that page. But works :)


I was able to accomplish editing the default.aspx page by:

  • Opening the site in SharePoint Designer 2013
  • Then clicking 'All Files' to view all of the files,
  • Then right-click -> Edit file in Advanced Mode.

By doing that I was able to remove the tagprefix causing a problem on my page.


You can always use Sharepoint Solution Generator to create a project and edit in VS2008.

You can find the Generator along with Sharepoint Developer tools.