Documents or Pages Not Published After Find Replace with Content Approval Enabled

Last updated: 2026-10-14

How to handle documents and pages that remain in Pending state after a Find Replace when Content Approval is enabled.

Introduction

If you use Find & Replace to fix links inside Documents or Publishing Pages (such as a Welcome Page) and have Content Approval enabled, the links may be fixed but the files remain in a Pending state instead of being Published.
Example of Content Approval enabled in a SharePoint Library:

Solution

• SharePoint Essentials Toolkit 2027 Release — Not yet supported.

• SharePoint Essentials Toolkit 2019 Release — Enable the "Preserve Content Approval State" option within the tool. This keeps the page in an Approved state after the replacement. Without this option, the page will remain as a Draft in Pending state.