Fast Site Creation in SharePoint 2016

Fast Site Creation is a new feature introduced in SharePoint 2016. As the name suggests, Fast site Creation helps to speed up the site collection creation process. Internally, site collections are copied at SQL Server content database level, instead of calling traditional object model calls. Typically, this helps any large organization or multi-tenant environment to create site collections faster by mitigating feature activation overhead. Here are the steps for SharePoint 2016 fast site collection creation.

Step 1: Enable Fast site creation for SharePoint Site Template

As a first step, we’ve to enable Fast site creation on a SharePoint site template. Let’s enable it for the team site template:

Enable-SPWebTemplateForSiteMaster -Template "STS#0" -CompatibilityLevel 15

To get all site templates with fast site creation enabled, use the cmdlet:

Get-SPWebTemplatesEnabledForSiteMaster

To Disable fast site creation for a site template, use the cmdlet: Disable-SPWebTemplateForSiteMaster. E.g.

Disable-SPWebTemplateForSiteMaster -Template STS#0

But you’ll have to remove the site master created for the template first!

Step 2: Create a new Site master

Once SharePoint Fast Site Creation is enabled on the template, a new Site Master should be created. Create Site Master in Content Database with New-SPSiteMaster

New-SPSiteMaster -ContentDatabase "SP16_Intranet_Content01" -Template "STS#0" 

This creates a master copy of the site collection. Site Master acts as the master copy for the site collection based on the template you choose, with all features, template settings, etc., preserved.

Step 3: Create a new site collection using the Site Master

Create new site collection with -CreateFromSiteMaster switch in the New-SPSite cmdlet.

New-SPSite https://intranet.crescent.com/sites/operations -ContentDatabase "SP16_Intranet_Content" -CompatibilityLevel 15 -CreateFromSiteMaster -OwnerAlias "Crescent\Salaudeen" -Template "STS#0" 

With fast site creation, site Collections are created by copying at the Content Database level, So the usual feature Activation cycle doesn’t happen! Fast site creation took 5 seconds instead of 40 seconds to create a site collection!

Remove Site Master
If you no longer use the site master, use Remove-SPSiteMaster cmdlet to remove the Site Master from the SharePoint Content database.  

Remove-SPSiteMaster -ContentDatabase "Content-database-name" -SiteId "GUID-Of-The-Site-Master"