Site collection vs Site in SharePoint 2013/2016/2019/Online

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It is always confusing to decide whether you should create a site collection or a site/subsite for any kind of business requirements like for each department or team in an organization in SharePoint. This article will help to know what are the factors you should consider whether you should go for a site collection or you should create a site in SharePoint.

If you are working for an enterprise then there is always a question comes whether we should create a site collection for individual departments or should we create one site collection and within that we will create nested sites for different departments like IT, Finance, HR, etc.

What is a SharePoint site?

A SharePoint site contains contents inside lists, document libraries, and pages, etc. A SharePoint site can have nested sites which are known as subsites.

What is a SharePoint Site collection?

A site collection is a collection of SharePoint sites. Each site collection will have a top-level site as well as can contain subsites. But ultimately it contains your department contents.

Site collection vs Site in sharepoint 2013
Site collection vs Site in SharePoint 2013

SharePoint site collection vs site

Whether to go for a Site Collection or Site depends on a few factors and business requirements. Factors like permission, size, etc.

  • One key point to note is that each site collection has its unique site columns, navigation, permissions (security groups), site templates, branding, etc. But Subsites on another hand, inherit all these properties from the top-level site in a site collection.
  • If you want to have a site that will use the same metadata, security, or navigation as the existing sites you already have, then go for a site rather than a site collection.
  • If you have a small organization and have the requirement of a limited number of SharePoint sites for your organization, then go for a site also rather than a site collection.
  • On the other hand, if you are a very large organization having multiple business units with different business functions and shareholders, you can go for creating various site collections.
  • If in your large organization has different navigation and different security groups, then go for site collections.
  • If your organization has lots of content then go for site collections.
  • If you want to share your content outside your organization like some content you want to share with external users, then go for a site collection. Like one site collection will be for your internal users and the other one site collection will be used for external users.

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I hope this will be helpful to learn SharePoint site collection vs sites. Now, you can decide when you should create a site collection in SharePoint and when you should create a site in SharePoint.

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