How to promote a subsite to a new site collection with new content db?

Question

We have subsites under our top-level site that are getting really big and I am trying to move them to their own site. I've created a new site collection and a contentDB. When I import the subsite over, It completes with no errors. When I try to view the site I receive the "Oops, something went wrong" page.

What I've done in powershell

Export-SPWeb http://root/subsite -Path \\shared\export\export.cmp

New-SPSite http://root/sites/newSite -OwnerAlias "Domain\User" -Name "New Site" -Template "STS#1" -ContentDatabase WSS_New_Site

Import-SPWeb http://root/sites/newSite -Path \\shared\export\export.cmp

UPDATE: I was able to get this moved over to a /sites/newSite path. The issue was that I did not have a feature enabled on the new site.

Now I'm trying to move it to its own managed path at http://root/newSite so that it would look the same as it did originally. I followed the same step I completed to get it to work the first time, now getting the same unsuccessful results. The site creates fine and import gives no error, but the site won't load. I can get to the site settings page afterwards, but cannot make any setting changes. The exported site only uses lists and a summary link webpart from what I can tell.

Is there a way to export the features being used by a subsite? Doing a simple comparison and enabling the features individually has not yielded any positive results.

Answer 1

Couple of things to check. Do you have any customization or site templates etc?did you hard-coded any urls? You have to take care of security groups as well.

• After exporting the subsite, try to create new site with blank templates.

  New-SPSite http:///sites/test -OwnerAlias "DOMAIN\JDoe" -ContentDatabase WSS_New_Site

• then import it using the import-spweb.

• an other option is use 3rd party tools i.e ShareGate( as offere free trail).

Answer 2

So my issue was never with the managed paths. Two things were causing the site not to load properly. The first was enabling the feature that supported the web part that was being used. In this case it was the "SharePoint Server Publishing" feature.

The other issue involved a custom template. I initially disregarded this because the custom template was a default template with a background image on it so I figured any default template would be fine. I'm still unsure why this caused the issue though. To resolve this I exported the .wsp file and imported the solution on the new site and had it set to that template prior to importing the site. Once the site imported successfully I was free to disable/uninstall the solution and use a default template.

The steps I took were:

• Export the site
• Create the new database to attach to
• Created the managed path for the new site
• Create the new site with the new database
• Enable any features needed
• Add the custom template
• Import the site

Hope this helps anyone in the future. And if there is a more efficient method I would love to know.