Hub Site
Common Use Cases
- Corporate intranet: a hub that connects all department sites, enabling cross-department news rollups and a unified navigation experience
- Product organization: a hub per product line, associating sprint team sites, documentation sites, and support sites for cross-product search and navigation
- Regional structure: each region has a hub with associated country or office sites, enabling region-specific news and navigation while sharing a global intranet root
- Project portfolios: a PMO hub associates all active project sites, surfacing project news, status, and documents through news and highlighted content web parts
- Compliance grouping: hubs group related team sites for scoped search and reporting, making it easy to audit content within a business function or regulatory domain
Benefits
- Federated search: hub-scoped search returns results only from associated sites, reducing noise and helping users find relevant content
- News aggregation: the News web part on a hub automatically aggregates news posts published across all associated sites, with no manual curation
- Shared navigation: hub navigation appears on all associated sites, providing consistent global links without duplicate entries per site
- Flat information architecture: hubs replace deep subsite hierarchies with a flat, associated model that is easier to manage and resilient to reorganization
- Dynamic association: sites can join or leave a hub at any time without content migration, making restructuring simple
Details
- Feature Category: Sites & Navigation
How It Works
- Register any site as a hub: any existing site can be registered as a hub, most often a communication site, and other sites then associate with it to inherit its navigation and theme, roll their news up, and join its search scope
- Association is a link, not a migration: sites join or leave a hub at any time with no content moves
- Content rolls up: news, events, and highlighted content published on associated sites surface in web parts on the hub
- Scoped search: a search run from the hub returns results from the hub family only
- Hub-to-hub association: hubs can be associated to other hubs to extend search across hub families
- Shared look and feel: the hub’s theme applies to associated sites, and the hub name and logo appear in the shared navigation bar
Limits and Nuances
- Architecture limits: up to 2,000 hubs per tenant, and hub-to-hub association is searchable across up to three levels, Microsoft’s recommended depth for the best search experience
- Admin-only registration: only SharePoint Administrators can register or unregister a hub; site owners can associate sites but cannot create hubs themselves
- One hub per site: a site associates with only one hub at a time, and a site already associated cannot itself become a hub until you remove the association
- Permissions never change: rolled-up content is security trimmed so users see only what they can already access, and the optional Sync hub permissions setting only pushes a read-only visitors group, taking up to four hours
- Association can be controlled: admins can restrict which people or groups may associate sites, and hub owners can require approval before a site joins
- Navigation links are manual: associating a site does not add it to hub navigation; hub owners add menu links themselves
- News flows up only: posts on associated sites roll up to the hub, but hub news does not flow down to associated sites
- Mind the display caps: the all-sites-in-hub web part lists at most 99 sites, and keep hub navigation under 100 links for performance and usability
Common Questions About Hub Sites
How many hub sites can we have in SharePoint?
Microsoft caps hub sites at 2,000 per tenant, which is far more than most organizations will ever use. The practical question is not the limit but the design: most mid-sized organizations do well with a hub per major function – HR, IT, Finance – plus the intranet home. When Greg Zelfond plans intranets for clients, the hub count usually lands in single digits.
Who can create a hub site?
Only SharePoint Administrators can register a site as a hub, either in the SharePoint admin center under Active sites or with PowerShell. Site owners cannot self-register hubs, but admins can grant specific people or groups the right to associate their sites with an existing hub, and hub owners can require approval for association requests. Day-to-day hub management then belongs to the hub site owner.
Does associating a site with a hub change its permissions?
No. Association never alters a site’s permissions – access is still controlled entirely by each site’s own groups and sharing settings. Everything that rolls up to the hub is security trimmed, so users only see news and content they already have access to. The optional Sync hub permissions setting grants read access only, by pushing the hub’s visitors group to associated sites.
Can a site belong to two hubs?
A site can be associated with only one hub at a time. If a site logically belongs in two places – say, a regional sales site that fits both the Sales hub and the Region hub – pick the association that matters most for news rollup and search, then add a plain navigation link from the other hub. Hubs themselves can also be associated to other hubs to extend search.
What is the difference between a hub site and a regular communication site?
Structurally they are the same site – a hub is simply a site (usually a communication site) that an administrator has registered as a hub. Registration unlocks the hub capabilities: shared navigation, a shared theme, news and content rollup from associated sites, and a search scope limited to the hub family. Unregister it and it goes back to being an ordinary site.
Are hub sites a replacement for subsites?
Yes, for most scenarios. Subsites hard-wire structure into URLs, so reorganizations break links and content; hubs model relationships as flexible associations, so a site can move from one hub to another in seconds with no migration. Microsoft recommends hubs plus a flat site architecture for modern intranets. Subsites still technically work, but they are an older construct best reserved for legacy cases.