If you’re carrying out platform upgrades from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013 these steps may interest you.

We have come across site collections where the “upgrade now” option in the SharePoint UI for the visual upgrade has failed, yet the PowerShell upgrade command worked perfectly.

PowerShell Upgrade Steps:

1. Open PowerShell
2. Restore the content database to SharePoint 2013 SQL by mounting the site:

   Mount-SPContentDatabase “MyDatabase” -DatabaseServer "MyServer" -WebApplication https://sitename 

    

   BrightWork doesn’t support SharePoint 2010 visuals, so you won’t yet be able to navigate to your site. You will if it’s a regular SharePoint site.

3. In PowerShell, run:

   Get-spsite 

   The site you just upgraded should be listed as type 14.

4. Run

   Test-SPSite https://server/sitecollection

   Warnings are ok in this test, but errors are not good. Please see the below link for more on test results.

5. Finally, run

   Upgrade-SPSite https://server/sitecollection –VersionUpgrade

   

6. Once this reaches 100% you will have the 2013 visuals throughout your site collection.

Originally posted 26 Feb 2014. Updated to include images. 

Image credit