SharePoint 2016 Central Admin - Application Management - Create Site Collection

When you click on the "Create Site Collection" link under "Web Application", you will land on "Create Site Collection" page. This page will let you create a new top level Site Collection in a given web application.


"Create Site Collection" page’s direct link - /_admin/createsite.aspx

Site Collection is the key thing in SharePoint. Site Collection is collection of lists, libraries, sites etc., that can have multiple sites, lists, and libraries.

Site collection can only be created under a Web Application, and the subsite, only under Site Collection. A web application can host multiple site collections, while a site collection is only a part of single web application. Also, site collection can have multiple subsites but that can only be under a single site collection. The below picture shows the structure.


Image borrowed from Technet.

In other words, Site collection is a grouping of subsites under the same top level site collection, which share same owners, storage quotas, security groups etc.

There are two types of site collections - Managed Path (wild card or implicit) and Host Name Site collection. We will discuss these in future articles.

In this article, we will create a team site collection for the krossfarm team.

Information Required Before begin

We need the following information before getting started.

  • Web Application: Name of the Web application under which new site collection will be created.
  • Title of the Site collection.
  • Description for the site collection.
  • Managed Path which will be used for the URL
  • Web site address
  • Template name which will be used for the Site collection
  • Primary & secondary site collection administrators
  • Quota if there is any quota template; else, no quota.

Create a Site Collection

Let’s walk through the steps to create a site collection in the Team Web Application.

  • Login with account which is part of Farm Administrator group on Central Admin Server.
  • Now, browse "Create A Site collection" page.
  • Now, enter the following information.

    • Make sure that right web application is selected i.e. in our case, Team web application.


    • Enter the title and description: “TestWaqas” as Site Collection Title & “Test site for Waqas” as description.


    • Enter the URL for the Site collection
      Select the managed path under which you want to create Site collection & URL of the web site, i.e. /sites/ as Managed Path & Testwaqas as URL.



    • Template Selection
      Now, select the template which you want to use for your Site collection. It depends on one’s requirement which site collection to pick. Team Site as per our requirement.



    • Primary & Secondary Site Collection Administrator
      Now, enter the primary and secondary site collection administrator. A Primary administrator must have entries while you can skip the secondary site collection administrator, i.e. "waqas" as primary and "install" as secondary.



    • Quota Template
      Now, if you have already defined the quota template, then use it or if you don’t want to select the quota at this time, then leave as is, i.e. No Quota as per requirement.


    • Click OK.


  • You have to wait for a couple of minutes

  • You will see the below success message, once it is completed.


Thus we learned how to create Site collection via Central Administrator.