4 ways to remove news posts from the SharePoint page

I blogged extensively about the news posts and the news widget in the past. This happens to be one of my favorite features/functionalities in SharePoint due to its ease of use and available customizations. But once you publish the news posts, how do you remove them from the news widget so they no longer appear on the landing page? I came up with 4 ways to do so – which I documented for you here, in this post.

1. Limit the number of posts in the News Widget

The first option you can employ would be by limiting the number of posts that appear in the news widget. You can control the number in only certain layouts (List, Side-by-side, Carousel, Tiles) when you edit the News Web Part.

Pros

• Easy to implement

Cons

• Does not delete the news post, just does not show it in the News Widget, so the news post can still be found/surfaced up via SharePoint search
• Only works if you want to hide older posts, not a specific post

2. Unpublish via the Site Pages Library

The next step up would be to unpublish the news posts (pages) via the Site Pages Library. When you unpublish the news post, it disappears from the News Web Part until it is republished again.

Pros

• Easy to implement
• Allows to hide a specific post
• Hides post from Search

Cons

• This option only works with users who have Visitor (Read-Only) access to the site. Members (Edit permission level) will still see the news post. This is due to the fact how Major and Minor versions work.

3. Delete the news post

If you no longer will need a particular announcement, you can always delete it. For that, you will need to navigate to the Site Pages Library as well.

Pros

• Removes the news post completely, so it will not even appear in Search

Cons

• Requires manual intervention

4. Expire the news post via the Expiration date

Probably the most elegant option would be to set an expiration date on the news posts. Now, this is not a built-in option in the news widget web part, but rather quick customization you would need to build using the custom metadata. I documented this trick in this post. It does the job well and allows you to “automate” news publishing/unpublishing when you deal with lots of announcements on a homepage.

Pros

• Unpublishes the news “automatically”

Cons

• Requires a bit of setup
• Does not delete the news post, just does not show it in the News Widget, so the news post can still be found/surfaced up via SharePoint search