What is a SharePoint hub site?
SharePoint hub sites help you meet the needs of your organization by connecting and organizing sites based on project, department, division, region, etc. making it easier to:
-
Discover related content such as news and other site activities
-
Apply common navigation, branding, and site structure across associated sites
-
Search across all associated sites
SharePoint administrators determine how many hub sites can be created in your organization, who can associate sites with each hub site, and whether associating a site to a hub requires approval. Planning your SharePoint hub sites will ensure you get the most out of using hub sites.
Note: You must be a SharePoint administrator to create a SharePoint hub site. Site owners, however, can associate a SharePoint site with a hub site that already exists. Sites created by clicking the Create site link in the top right corner of a hub site will automatically be associated with that hub site.
In this article:
Image of a hub site home page
Search across the hub
When you search from a SharePoint hub site, content on the hub site itself and from any associated sites are returned in the search results. Viewers will only see content for which they have access to.
Recommended web parts
When a SharePoint administrator creates a hub site, they're converting an existing SharePoint site to a hub site. A hub site navigation bar will appear at the top of the site, but the home page and all site contents will remain the same.
To get the most out of your hub site, the site's owner can add the following web parts to the home page:
News roll-up
News published on a hub site and on any associated sites is automatically aggregated and shown on the home page of the hub site by using the News web part. You can choose which associated sites display news on the hub site home page and viewers will only see news for sites they have access to. Selecting a news article link takes you to the site on which the article was published.
Associated sites
Display the most active sites associated with the hub site on the home page by using the Sites web part.
Highlighted content
Use the Highlighted content web part to dynamically display content from sites associated with the hub site on the home page.
Events
Use the Events web part to dynamically display events from sites associated with the hub site on the home page.
Hub site security
Sites associated with a SharePoint hub site don't inherit the permissions of the hub site by default. Hub owners can enable hub site permissions sync to push visitors to associated sites. With that said each site, including the hub site, will retain their current permission settings.
Associating sites to a hub site
There are two ways to add sites to a hub site.
You can create a new site that is automatically associated with your hub site by clicking Create site in the top right corner of the hub site.
Or, existing sites can associate to a hub site through an approved association flow. Hub site owners can set up your SharePoint hub site to automatically evaluate requests for sites before the association takes place.
Ready to create a SharePoint hub site or associate a SharePoint site with an existing hub site?
Planning your SharePoint hub sites
Create a hub site in SharePoint Online