SharePoint hub sites
Hub sites connect many SharePoint sites under shared navigation, branding, and search. Here's how they work.
A hub site in SharePoint Online is a SharePoint site (usually a communication site) that other sites can associate with. Associated sites inherit the hub's top navigation, theme, search scope, and (optionally) news aggregation. It's the modern building block for intranets that aren't all in one giant site.
Why hub sites exist
Before hub sites, large intranets either lived in one enormous site collection with rigid permissions, or sprawled across dozens of independent sites with no shared navigation. Hub sites split the difference: each site keeps its own permissions and lifecycle, but they appear unified to users.
What associating a site to a hub gives you
- Shared top navigation that's edited once on the hub and shows everywhere.
- Shared theme and logo for visual consistency.
- Shared search scope — searching from any associated site searches across the whole hub.
- Rolled-up news and content in hub web parts.
- Common nav and chrome without copying anything between sites.
A site is associated to exactly one hub at a time, but the hub itself can be associated with a parent hub — creating two levels of nesting. Microsoft also added hub-to-hub associations for very large intranets.
Anatomy of a modern intranet
A typical structure:
- A company home hub (communication site).
- Department hubs (HR, Finance, Engineering, Sales) — each a communication site, each a hub.
- Project, team, and unit team sites associated to the relevant department hub.
- Microsoft 365 Group sites and Teams sites also associated, if appropriate.
Users see one coherent intranet; admins manage each site separately.
Limits and practical notes
- A tenant supports up to 2,000 hub sites, though most organisations have far fewer.
- Designating a site as a hub requires the SharePoint admin role and is done in the SharePoint admin center.
- Hub navigation is text + links — it's not a full content management system, so keep it small and well-structured.
- Tenant-wide navigation policies can also enforce home-site behaviour on top of hubs, since SharePoint introduced home site and Viva Connections as the entry-point experience.
Used carefully, hub sites give a federated intranet a coherent feel without forcing everyone into a single permissions model.