How to Find Your Largest SharePoint Sites (2026)

Find the Sites Eating Your SharePoint Storage

When a SharePoint tenant's storage bar turns red, the cause is almost never spread evenly. Storage consumption is heavily skewed - a small number of sites and libraries typically account for most of the pool. Before you can reduce SharePoint storage, you have to find those sites. This guide covers four ways to do it, from the admin center to PowerShell, all verified against Microsoft's current documentation.

Every tenant starts with a pooled allocation of 1 TB plus 10 GB per licensed user, and pays $0.20 per GB per month ($2,400 per TB per year) above it. Knowing which sites are driving you over that line is the first step to getting the bill down.

Method 1: The Active Sites View (Fastest)

The quickest way to rank your sites by storage is the SharePoint admin center.

1. Go to Active sites in the SharePoint admin center, signed in with SharePoint Administrator permissions.
2. In the upper right, the storage bar shows total and available storage for your subscription. If you use Multi-Geo, pointing at the bar breaks it down by geo location.
3. Select the Storage used column header to sort every site in the tenant from largest to smallest.

This gives you an immediate, sorted view of your biggest sites with no scripting. One caveat to keep in mind across every method below: storage usage does not include changes made in the last 24 to 48 hours, and SharePoint calculates storage in binary gigabytes (1 GB = 2^30 bytes), so figures may differ slightly from what you expect.

Method 2: Per-Site Storage Metrics (What's Inside)

The Active sites view tells you which site is large. To see what inside it is consuming space, use the per-site Storage Metrics page.

1. On the site, go to Settings > Site information > View all site settings.
2. Under Site Collection Administration, select Storage Metrics.

Storage Metrics breaks down consumption by library, folder, and file, so you can see whether the weight is in a specific document library, a bloated media folder, the recycle bin, or version history. This is where a large site resolves into a specific, actionable target.

Method 3: PowerShell (Rank the Whole Tenant)

For a repeatable, exportable ranking across the entire tenant, use the SharePoint Online Management Shell. This command lists your ten largest sites by current storage use:

Get-SPOSite -Limit All |
  Select-Object Title, StorageUsageCurrent, StorageQuota, Url |
  Sort-Object StorageUsageCurrent -Descending |
  Select-Object -First 10

StorageUsageCurrent is reported in megabytes. To check a single site in detail:

Get-SPOSite -Identity <SiteURL> |
  Select-Object StorageUsageCurrent, StorageQuota, StorageQuotaWarningLevel

Two things to note: Get-SPOSite does not return site collections that are in the recycle bin, and the same 24-48 hour reporting lag applies. Pipe the first command to Export-Csv if you want a snapshot to track month over month.

Method 4: The Admin Usage Reports

For a broader view over time, the Microsoft 365 admin center provides a SharePoint storage report and a SharePoint site usage report (under Reports > Usage). These show storage used across sites with trend lines over 7, 30, 90, and 180 days, which is useful for spotting which sites are growing fastest - not just which are largest today. Growth rate often matters more than current size when you are deciding where to act.

A Faster Visual View

If you would rather see your storage distribution visually than read a sorted table, our free SharePoint Storage Explorer maps where storage is being consumed across your tenant, so the heavy sites and libraries stand out at a glance. It is a free tool with no obligation - a quick way to turn "our storage is full" into "these five sites are the problem."

What to Do Once You've Found Them

Identifying the largest sites is the diagnosis. The treatment depends on what Storage Metrics reveals is inside them:

• Bloated version history - usually the biggest single consumer. Trim it with the method in SharePoint version history storage.
• Deleted content still counting - empty the two-stage recycle bin (93-day retention) and review the Preservation Hold Library.
• Large redundant files - media, ISOs, and old migration dumps that can be moved out of premium storage.
• Inactive content - files no longer in active use that are still paying the full SharePoint rate.

For that last category - which on most tenants is the largest by far - the durable fix is archiving. Squirrel runs scheduled, policy-driven archiving that moves inactive content out of your biggest sites and into your own Azure Blob Storage, at a fraction of the SharePoint overage rate, leaving a stub so users can still find and restore their files. Instead of manually cleaning the same sites again next year, a policy keeps them lean automatically. See SharePoint Online archiving for the full approach.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I find which SharePoint site is using the most storage? The fastest way is the Active sites view in the SharePoint admin center - select the Storage used column to sort every site from largest to smallest. For a scriptable, exportable ranking, use Get-SPOSite -Limit All sorted by StorageUsageCurrent.

How do I see what is taking up space inside a site? Go to the site's Storage Metrics page (Site settings > Site Collection Administration > Storage Metrics). It breaks storage consumption down by library, folder, and file, so you can pinpoint what is consuming the quota.

Why does the reported storage look wrong or out of date? SharePoint storage figures do not include changes made in the last 24 to 48 hours, and storage is calculated in binary gigabytes (1 GB = 2^30 bytes). Sites in the recycle bin are also excluded from Get-SPOSite results.

What should I do about my largest sites? Use the per-site Storage Metrics to find the cause - usually version history, deleted-but-retained content, or inactive files. Trim version history, clear recycle bins, and archive inactive content with Squirrel to move it into your own Azure storage at a lower rate.

Related reading

• How to reduce SharePoint Online storage
• SharePoint version history storage: find and reduce it
• SharePoint Recycle Bin: how to recover deleted files
• SharePoint Preservation Hold Library explained
• SharePoint Online archiving - the complete enterprise guide

Turn "Storage Is Full" Into a Plan

Once you know which sites are the problem, archiving keeps them lean for good. See how Squirrel cuts SharePoint storage costs by moving inactive content into your own Azure storage, or contact us to walk through your tenant's biggest sites.