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.

Shared hub navigation

At the top of a hub site and any associated sites is the hub site navigation bar. If you are the hub site owner, you can customize this navigation bar and can choose to use the mega menu layout.

Hub navigation is highlighted

Important: It can take up to 24 hours for the hub navigation changes to be reflected for all users.

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.

Search results on a SharePoint hub site

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.

SharePoint hub site news

Associated sites

Display the most active sites associated with the hub site on the home page by using the Sites web part.

Top sites associated with a hub site

Highlighted content

Use the Highlighted content web part to dynamically display content from sites associated with the hub site on the home page.

Example of highlighted content on a page

Events

Use the Events web part to dynamically display events from sites associated with the hub site on the home page.

Events

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.