Change Master Page in SharePoint using PowerShell

Requirement: Change Master page for SharePoint Site collections.

After a branding redesign project, Got a requirement to change master pages on existing sites. branding on new sites going to be created. But for existing sites, We got to change master pages manually.

change master page in sharepoint using powershell

SharePoint: Set master page using PowerShell

Let’s change master page in SharePoint using PowerShell.

Add-PSSnapin microsoft.sharepoint.powershell -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

#Get the Web
$web = Get-SPWeb "https://intranet.crescent.com/branding"

#Prepare the Custom Master page URL
$WebURL = $web.ServerRelativeUrl.TrimEnd("/")
$MasterPageURL = $WebURL+"/_catalogs/masterpage/crescentv1.master"

#Set Default and Custom Master pages
$web.MasterUrl = $MasterPageURL
$web.CustomMasterUrl = $MasterPageURL

#Apply Changes
$web.Update() 

Change master page SharePoint 2013 using PowerShell
How about All sites in a site collection? Here is the PowerShell script in SharePoint 2013 to change the master page.

#Variable for Site collection
$SiteURL ="https://intranet.crescent.com"

#Get the Site object
$site = Get-SPSite $SiteURL

#Iterate through each web
foreach ($web in $site.AllWebs)
{
   #Prepare the Custom Master page URL
   $WebURL = $web.ServerRelativeUrl.TrimEnd("/")
   $MasterPageURL = $WebURL+"/_catalogs/masterpage/crescentv1.master"

   $web.MasterUrl = $MasterPageURL;
   $web.CustomMasterUrl = $MasterPageURL;
 
   $web.Update();

   Write-Host "Master page set for: $web.Url
}

We can modify the above code to apply master page for entire web application, even entire SharePoint farm!

Salaudeen Rajack

Salaudeen Rajack - SharePoint Expert with Two decades of SharePoint Experience. Love to Share my knowledge and experience with the SharePoint community, through real-time articles!

2 thoughts on “Change Master Page in SharePoint using PowerShell

  • The script is incorrect beside a syntax error on line 19
    The $MasterPageURL is built up by de web url this must be the site collection url
    otherwise the url is wrong with a site collection having one or more subsites (webs)
    and then the $MasterPageURL can be set before the loop as it wont change anymore for all the sub sites (webs)
    If you run the above script subsite wont open and will give a file not found (because of the incorrect master url).

    Reply
    • Well, that depends on how you have deployed the master page! Ideally, it should be deployed at each web – while its possible to inherit from the site collection.

      Reply

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