What is Site, Web, Site Template and Web Template in SharePoint?

Question

Can anyone please tell me what the difference is between Site and Web in SharePoint.

Also what is Site Template and Web Template?

Answer 1

Web Template:

Web template refers to new feature element available in SharePoint 2010, which provides us flexible way to define definition (onet.xml file), which will be used only on provisioning time, when the site is created. There are no references to the definition on runtime, which provide easy maintainability for the definition.

Source

Site Template:

SharePoint site templates are pre-built definitions designed around a particular business need. You can use these templates as they are to create your own SharePoint site and then customize the site as much as you like. You’re probably familiar with the default site templates, like Team Site, Blog site, and Group Work Site as shown here.

In addition to the default templates, you can create your own site template based on a site you’ve created and customized in SharePoint. This is a powerful feature in SharePoint that allows you to create a custom solution and then share that solution with your peers, the broader organization, or outside organizations. You can also package the site and open it in another environment or application like Microsoft Visual Studio and further customize it there.

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Site:

A site collection consists of a top-level site and one or more sites below it. Each top-level site and any sites below it in the site structure are based on a site template and can have other unique settings and unique content. Partition your site collection content into separate sites to obtain finer control of the appearance, content, and features of the various pages in your site collection.

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Answer 2

Site

Represents a collection of sites in a Web application, including a top-level website and all its subsites.

Web

Represents a SharePoint website.

Site Template

Contains a customized site design based on an existing site definition. Site templates in this context exist outside of any site definition.

Real World Example The marketing team has a new layout for sites from a particular product family, so a new custom site design that is based on a team site, but with preconfigured display layout, is created and a template saved from it.

Web Template: Is the aspect of your Website. Including: active feature, pre installed list or document library, pre installed content type etc

Answer 3

SPWeb and SPSite are API class Names in SharePoint. SPWeb represents sites and SPSite represents Site Collection(collection of sites)

The important advantage with the web templates compared to the site templates is the fact that we can utilize the publishing features in web templates. Incase of Site Templates , they are not supported when Publishing Features are enabled.

for Understanding Difference between Site Template and Web Template you can refer this link