Customization has always been one of SharePoint’s most seductive promises. You can change it, bend it, and make it look different. For a long time, that felt like progress.

What we did not talk about enough was the tax that came with it. A tax that rarely appeared in project plans or demos, but showed up later in the form of broken pages, confused users, and endless maintenance.

I spent years deep in that world. Custom master pages. Injected CSS. jQuery stitched into places it was never meant to live. Custom tabs, custom navigation, custom everything. It worked, until it didn’t.

I lost count of how many hours I spent validating site after site after site, clicking through pages after an update just to make sure nothing had quietly broken. One small change in the DOM, one script loading out of order, one platform update, and suddenly buttons disappeared or layouts behaved just differently enough to cause support tickets.

Eventually, the same question kept coming back to me, usually much later than it should have.

Were those custom tabs really that important?

Over time, I developed a strong preference for sticking with out-of-the-box features. Not because they were perfect, but because they were predictable. Microsoft owned them. Microsoft tested them. And when they broke, Microsoft fixed them.

This mindset did not come from theory. It came from pain.

Things are undeniably better today. The SharePoint Framework is a massive improvement over the old days of script injection and master page gymnastics. It is structured, supported, and far more resilient. But the core question has not changed.

Just because you can build something, should you?

This is where the 80/20 rule matters. SharePoint out of the box covers most real-world needs far better than we like to admit. The remaining 20 percent is where teams tend to overinvest, overcustomize, and overcomplicate. That 20 percent is also where most long-term problems are born.

I touched on this recently in Day 10, when talking about web part overload. Customization often starts as a small tweak and quietly snowballs into an experience users never asked for.

This pattern also ties directly back to Day 2. For years, I was asked the same question in different forms. Can you make it not look like SharePoint?

We did. And we paid for it later.

Over time, I learned to treat customization requests with a lot of caution. Not because users were wrong, but because the platform underneath was always changing. The Site Actions menu moved from left to right, then right to left, then changed names entirely. That pattern continues today. The upload button in document libraries was recently moved again, as described in Microsoft’s recent UX updates.

Every one of those shifts breaks assumptions baked into custom UI.

The risk of over-customizing is not just functional. It is also ethical. Accessibility is often the first casualty. Custom CSS, custom colors, and clever formatting routinely break contrast requirements and keyboard navigation, excluding real users from doing their work.

Even within SharePoint’s own capabilities, this is easy to get wrong. Stefan Bauer highlights this clearly in his article on accessible colors in Microsoft List formatting, showing how quickly list formatting can violate accessibility standards without anyone noticing.

Those standards exist for a reason. The WCAG guidelines define minimum requirements to ensure people can actually use what we build. Over-customization makes compliance harder, not easier.

And it does not stop at visuals. Over-customization also shows up in permissions, information architecture, navigation, and clever one-off solutions that only make sense to the person who built them. Every exception increases cognitive load. Every workaround becomes someone else’s problem later.

Over time, I learned that consistency beats cleverness almost every time. Predictable experiences scale. Custom ones demand constant attention.

Customization is not evil. But it should be earned.

If a solution cannot survive platform updates, accessibility requirements, changing teams, and new users without constant babysitting, it is not a solution. It is a liability.

Most SharePoint environments are not suffering from a lack of customization. They are suffering from too much of it.

The hidden tax is not technical. It is trust. Every broken interaction, every inconsistent page, and every inaccessible choice teaches users that the platform cannot be relied on.

And once trust is gone, no amount of customization will bring it back.

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This post is part of my 25 days of SharePoint series, created to celebrate SharePoint’s 25th anniversary and lead up to the SharePoint at 25 digital event on March 2.

Each post reflects on what actually made SharePoint last 25 years, the wins, the mistakes, and the lessons learned from building, breaking, and rebuilding it in real organizations.

You can find all posts in this series here.

If there’s a topic you think I should cover next, a SharePoint mistake you keep seeing, or a question no one ever answers straight, leave a comment. This series is shaped by real experiences, not marketing slides.