SharePoint communication sites deep dive

A SharePoint communication site is designed for broadcasting information to a wide audience — intranet portals, departmental news hubs, HR-policy reference, knowledge bases. Different from team sites (workspaces for collaborating groups), communication sites are read-oriented for most users with a small set of authors.

When to choose a communication site

• Department intranet — HR, Finance, IT, Engineering portal pages.
• Corporate news hub with regularly-published articles.
• Reference content — policies, procedures, knowledge base articles.
• Brand assets and templates library.
• Onboarding portals for new hires.

Not the right choice for:

• Collaborative team workspaces — use team sites.
• Project workspaces — use Microsoft Teams (which creates a team site).
• Shared editing environments — communication sites assume read-mostly.

Site templates

When creating a communication site, Microsoft offers templates:

• Topic — for general broadcast content with news and links.
• Showcase — for visual content with hero images and gallery layouts.
• Blank — start from scratch.

Plus industry templates (healthcare, government, nonprofit) that pre-populate with relevant content patterns.

Building a good communication site

A few principles:

Design with the homepage as the hero

The homepage is where most users start. Invest in:

• Hero web part — visual entry points to key content.
• News web part — recent articles surfaced.
• Quick links — frequently-accessed pages and external resources.
• Events web part for upcoming dates.
• People web part highlighting team members.

A great homepage answers "what should I look at first?" in 5 seconds.

Information architecture matters

Plan the navigation before building pages:

• Top navigation — major sections.
• Hub navigation (if the site is part of a hub) — shared across the hub.
• Footer navigation — terms, contact, legal.

Keep navigation depth shallow — 2 levels usually enough. Too-deep navigation loses users.

News as continuous engagement

The news posts feature drives ongoing engagement:

• Authors publish news posts on the site.
• Posts surface in the homepage news web part.
• Posts can appear in Viva Connections feeds.
• Subscribed users get email digests via news digest.

For corporate-communications scenarios, news posts are how the comms team reaches employees consistently.

Audience targeting

For mixed-audience sites, audience targeting in modern SharePoint lets specific content show only to specific groups:

• Pages — visible only to specific audiences.
• Links in navigation — different links per audience.
• Library content — surfaced based on user attributes.

Built on Entra ID groups; powerful for personalisation.

Permissions model

Communication sites typically have:

• Site members — small set of authors with edit permissions.
• Site visitors — broad audience with read permissions (often "Everyone except external users" or a specific group).
• No external sharing for most intranet content (unless intentional public-facing).

Unlike team sites, communication sites aren't connected to a Microsoft 365 Group — no shared mailbox, no Teams team. They're pure content surfaces.

Hub integration

Most communication sites are part of a hub site:

• The hub provides shared navigation across the hub's associated sites.
• Hub search aggregates results across the hub.
• Theme and branding shared.

A typical corporate intranet has a home site (top of hub hierarchy) with associated department hubs (HR hub, IT hub, etc.), each hub having its own communication sites and team sites.

Operational considerations

• Named owner for every communication site — who maintains it.
• Editorial calendar for news posts — consistent cadence beats sporadic flurries.
• Analytics — built-in site analytics show what's read, what isn't.
• Stale content review — quarterly check for outdated content.
• Accessibility — alt text on images, proper heading structure, sufficient colour contrast.

Viva Connections integration

For organisations with Viva Connections enabled, the corporate home site becomes the Connections home experience in Teams. Users see the intranet experience inside Teams, with personalised dashboard cards alongside the SharePoint pages.

For organisations with serious intranet investment, communication sites plus Viva Connections deliver a modern, mobile-friendly, personalised intranet at fraction of the cost of dedicated intranet products.