View all site collections in SharePoint Server
APPLIES TO: 
2013 2016 2019 Subscription Edition 
SharePoint in Microsoft 365
A site collection is a group of websites that have the same owner and share administrative settings, for example, permissions, and quotas. Site collections are created within a web application. When you create a site collection, a top-level site is automatically created in the site collection. You can then create one or more subsites below the top-level site. The entire structure of the top-level site and all its subsites is called a site collection.
Learn about Managing sites in the new SharePoint admin center in Microsoft 365.
View the site collections in a web application
Use the following procedures to view all the site collections in a web application.
To view all site collections by using Central Administration
Refer to the following table in step 3.
| Item | Description |
|---|---|
| URL | The URL of the site collection. |
| Title | The current title for site collection. |
| Description | The current description for the site collection. |
| Primary administrator | The primary administrator for the site collection. |
| Email address | The email address for the primary administrator. |
| Database name | The content database that is used by the site collection. |
Verify that you have the following administrative credentials:
To view all site collections, you must be a member of the Farm Administrators group on the computer that is running the SharePoint Central Administration website.
Open Central Administration. On the Application Management page, in the Site Collections section, click View all site collections.
The Site Collection List page lists all the site collections in the web application.
To display more information about a site collection, in the URL column, click the site collection.
The table just before this procedure appears on the right side of the page.
If you want to change the selected web application, click the Web Application box, and then click Change Web Application. Use the Select Web Application page to select another web application.
To view all site collections by using Microsoft PowerShell
Verify that you meet the following minimum requirements: See Add-SPShellAdmin.
Open SharePoint Management Shell.
At the PowerShell command prompt, type the following command, and then press ENTER:
Get-SPWebApplication | Get-SPSite -Limit All | Format-Table -Property URL,ContentDatabaseNote
This command displays the URLs of all the web applications in a server farm and the site collections in each web application.
For more information, see Get-SPWebApplication and Get-SPSite.
We recommend that you use Microsoft PowerShell when performing command-line administrative tasks. The Stsadm command-line tool has been deprecated, but is included to support compatibility with previous product versions.