SharePoint 2016 Central Admin - Application Management - Delete A Site Collection

When you click on the "Delete a Site collection" link, you will land on the “Delete Site collection” page. This page will allow you to delete a site collection.



Delete a site collection page’s direct link - /_admin/delsite.aspx

Sometime SharePoint administrators want to delete a single or multiple site collections from the Farm. There are a couple of ways to delete site collections.

• Using Central Admin, but in this option, you can delete a single site at a time.
• Using the PowerShell command, with PowerShell we can delete multiple site collections.
• A site collection administrator also can delete the site collection.

Deleting a site collection requires proper diligence because you may select the wrong site collection for deletion, which causes trouble for the company. When you delete site collections from Central Admin, it means that it will delete everything under that site collections (all sub-sites, libraries etc.). Thus, think twice before deleting it.

The good thing is that even if we delete a site collection from either method, it will go into Central Admin Recycle Bin and stays there for 30 days. Therefore, we can restore a deleted site collection within 30 days after the deletion. However, to access Central Admin Recycle Bin, we have to use PowerShell. There is no GUI for it.

Note

Please make sure that you have the backup of the site collection before deleting it with which, it becomes possible for you to restore it. By deleting a site collection, it means that you will lose all the data inside that collection (including sub-sites, list, libraries, pages etc.)

To delete a site collection

Please follow the steps given below to delete a site collection.

1. Log on to Central Admin with Farm Admin account.
2. Browse to "Delete a site collection " page.
3. Click Site Collections dropdown and click “Change Site Collection”.




4. On this page, select the site collection, which you want to delete. If site collection is on this page, select it and proceed to Step # 8.




5. If the site collections from different Web Applications are different, then click on the dropdown, which is next to Web Applications and select Change Web Application




6. Now, select the Web app ( TeamWeb in our case).




7. In this page, If site collections are listed, click on that and proceed to  Step # 8, else proceed to the next step.




8. If site collection is not listed, then search for it. You have to search with a Short name. In the URL search, type the URL i.e /ManagedPath/sitecollection in our case/ sites/ trust-test.




9. It will list the all site collections started from trust- and select the desired site collection.




10. Now, it will bring back the main screen. Double check the site collection name and click Delete.




11. A warning Message will pop up, give you another chance to review it before delete. If all is correct, then click OK, as shown below.




12. It will take time depending upon the size of site collection.


13. On successful completion, it will bring you back on this page.

This will conclude this article, in which we learned how to delete a site collection from the Central Admin Web site.