You’ve been asked to build a SharePoint intranet. You open SharePoint, create a site, start adding pages — and within a month, you’ve got 15 disconnected sites, no consistent navigation, and employees who can’t find anything. Sound familiar?
The problem isn’t SharePoint. It’s that nobody planned the structure before building.
Most intranet failures at mid-sized organizations trace back to the same root cause: teams jump straight into design and content before answering the architectural questions that actually determine whether the intranet works. How many sites do we need? What type should each one be? How do they connect? Who owns what?
This guide answers those questions. It walks you through the modern SharePoint intranet structure model — hub sites, communication sites, and team sites in a flat hub-and-spoke pattern — and gives you a practical framework you can map to your own organization and start building from this week.
Why Structure Matters More Than Design
A SharePoint intranet’s structure is the underlying architecture that determines how sites connect, where content lives, and how employees find what they need. It’s the foundation that makes everything else — design, navigation, search, governance — actually work.
Research from Nielsen Norman Group and Prescient Digital Media estimates that 50–70% of intranets fail to achieve meaningful adoption. The leading causes aren’t ugly homepages or missing features. They’re poor navigation and irrelevant content — both symptoms of weak information architecture.
Here’s the pattern we see repeatedly with clients: the team spends weeks picking colors, configuring web parts, and debating homepage layouts. Nobody decides how the sites connect to each other. Nobody maps out which department gets its own site versus sharing one. Nobody defines who owns the content in each section. Launch day arrives, and the intranet looks polished. Three months later, half the pages are stale, search returns irrelevant results, and employees go back to email for everything.
Structure isn’t the exciting part of an intranet project. But it’s the part that determines whether your intranet is still useful six months after launch.
The Three Building Blocks of a Modern SharePoint Intranet
Modern SharePoint Online uses a flat architecture. If you’ve worked with SharePoint Classic, forget everything you know about subsites and nested site collections. Microsoft explicitly recommends against subsites in the modern experience — they’re rigid, break URLs when you reorganize, and create permission inheritance nightmares.
Instead, every modern SharePoint intranet is built from three types of sites. Understanding what each one does is the first step to a solid structure.
| Building Block | What It Does | When to Use It | Who Uses It |
| Hub Site | Groups related sites under shared navigation and branding. Aggregates news and content across connected sites. | One per major organizational function (e.g., Corporate, HR, Operations) | Everyone — it’s the connective layer |
| Communication Site | Broadcasts information to a broad audience. One-to-many: few authors, many readers. | Department homepages, policy portals, company news, leadership updates | All employees as readers; department leads as authors |
| Team Site | Enables collaboration for a specific group. Many-to-many: all members create and edit content. | Project workspaces, department working files, committee collaboration | Team members with edit access |
The key distinction: Communication sites are for publishing. Team sites are for collaborating. Hub sites are the glue that connects both types into a coherent intranet. Mixing these up is one of the most common structural mistakes — and it causes permission and navigation problems that are painful to unwind later.
One detail that trips people up: a hub site isn’t a separate site type. It’s a role you assign to an existing communication site (or, less commonly, a team site). You create a communication site, register it as a hub, and then associate other sites to it. The hub then provides shared navigation, branding, and content aggregation across all associated sites.
How to Map Your Organization to a Hub-and-Spoke Model
The hub-and-spoke model is Microsoft’s recommended approach for modern SharePoint intranet structure, and for good reason. It’s flexible, scalable, and doesn’t break when your org chart changes — because the connections between sites are links, not physical hierarchies.
Here’s how to map it to your organization in four steps:
Step 1: Identify your hubs. Hubs represent the major functional areas of your organization. Most mid-sized companies need 3–5 hubs. Don’t create a hub for every department — that defeats the purpose. Think in terms of audiences and functions.
Common hub structure:
- Corporate Hub — Company-wide news, policies, leadership updates, all-hands content
- HR Hub — Benefits, onboarding, training, employee handbook, leave policies
- Operations Hub — Processes, SOPs, safety, project portfolios
- IT Hub — Help desk, system status, how-to guides, software requests
- Optional: Department-specific hub if a department is large enough to warrant its own ecosystem
Step 2: Map communication sites to each hub. Under each hub, identify which departments or functions need their own communication site for broadcasting information. Each communication site connects to one hub and inherits that hub’s navigation and branding.
For example, under the HR Hub:
- Benefits & Compensation (communication site)
- Learning & Development (communication site)
- New Hire Onboarding (communication site)
Step 3: Map team sites for collaboration. Identify which teams or projects need dedicated collaboration spaces. These team sites can also associate to a hub for discoverability, but their primary purpose is internal team work — not broadcasting.
For example, under the Operations Hub:
- Facilities Project Team (team site)
- Q2 Capital Planning (team site)
- Safety Committee (team site)
Step 4: Define your home site. Your home site is the single intranet landing page — the front door. Microsoft lets you designate one communication site as the “home site” for your entire tenant. This should be your Corporate Hub or a dedicated intranet homepage that aggregates news and navigation from all hubs.
Register it as your home site in the SharePoint admin center, and connect it to Viva Connections so it appears inside Microsoft Teams. This single configuration step can double your intranet’s daily visibility — because your employees are already in Teams eight hours a day.
Navigation, Permissions, and Content Ownership
A good structure is invisible to users. They don’t think about hub sites or communication sites — they just find what they need. That experience depends on three things you configure on top of your structure.
Global navigation is the top-level menu visible across your entire tenant via the SharePoint app bar. Keep it to 5–7 links maximum. Link to your hubs and your most-used resources (HR portal, IT help desk, company directory). This is not the place for department-specific links — those belong at the hub level.
Hub navigation is shared across all sites associated with a hub. This is where you list the communication sites and key resources within that functional area. When an employee visits any site connected to the HR Hub, they see the same hub navigation — Benefits, Onboarding, Learning, Policies — regardless of which specific site they’re on. This consistency is one of the biggest UX wins of the hub model.
Local site navigation is unique to each individual site. Use this for page-level content within a specific communication or team site.
Permissions follow the same layered approach. Start with the broadest access and restrict only where necessary. A practical model:
- Hub sites and communication sites: Read access for all employees (this is your intranet — everyone should be able to read it)
- Team sites: Scoped to members of that team or project
- Sensitive content (compensation data, legal documents): Restricted libraries within specific sites, not separate sites with unique permission sets
The part that makes or breaks everything? Content ownership. Every communication site needs a named owner — someone accountable for keeping it current. Not a committee. Not “the department.” A person. Without this, even the best-structured intranet accumulates stale content within weeks. Assign owners during the planning phase, document it, and build a quarterly review cadence.
For a detailed walkthrough of governance models, permissions strategies, and content workflows for mid-sized teams, see our guide to SharePoint governance.
4 SharePoint Intranet Structure Mistakes to Avoid
These are the structural failures that create the most pain — and they’re all preventable if you catch them during planning.
1. Using Subsites Instead of Flat Architecture
This is the single most common legacy mistake. In SharePoint Classic, subsites were the default way to organize content. In modern SharePoint, they create rigid URL structures that break when you reorganize, prevent you from moving sites between hubs, and make permission management exponentially harder. Microsoft’s own documentation explicitly recommends flat architecture with hub associations for modern intranets. If you’re starting fresh, don’t use subsites. If you’ve inherited them, plan a migration to flat sites connected via hubs.
2. Creating Too Many (or Too Few) Hub Sites
We’ve seen organizations create a hub for every department, which dilutes the hub’s purpose and makes global navigation unwieldy. We’ve also seen the opposite: one hub for the entire company, which provides no meaningful grouping. The sweet spot for most mid-sized organizations is 3–5 hubs. If you’re unsure, start with fewer. You can always add a hub later. Removing one is much harder.
3. Ignoring the Home Site Configuration
Your intranet needs a designated front door. Without registering a home site in the SharePoint admin center, employees land on the generic SharePoint start page — which shows their recent and followed sites but has no organizational context. Registering a home site and connecting it to Viva Connections puts your intranet inside Teams, which is where most employees already spend their day. Skipping this step halves your intranet’s potential reach.
4. Building Structure Around Your Org Chart (Only)
It’s tempting to mirror your org chart directly — one site per department, nested under its division. But employees don’t always think in org-chart terms. They think in tasks: “I need to submit a leave request.” “I need the expense policy.” “I need to find the safety SOP.” Layer task-based navigation on top of your organizational structure. Put the five most common employee tasks on your homepage, regardless of which department owns them. Structure should serve users, not politics.
Sample Intranet Structure for a Mid-Sized Organization
Here’s what a practical SharePoint intranet structure looks like for a typical 200–500 person organization. Adapt the specifics to your departments, but the pattern holds.
Home Site (Intranet Homepage) Registered as home site + connected to Viva Connections
- Company news aggregated from all hubs
- Quick links to top 5 employee tasks
- Company directory (People web part)
- Events calendar
- Leadership updates
Hub: Corporate
- Company Policies (communication site)
- Internal Communications (communication site)
- All-Hands & Events (communication site)
Hub: Human Resources
- Benefits & Compensation (communication site)
- Onboarding (communication site)
- Learning & Development (communication site)
- HR Operations (team site — restricted)
Hub: Operations
- Standard Operating Procedures (communication site)
- Safety & Compliance (communication site)
- Capital Projects Portfolio (communication site)
- Individual project workspaces (team sites — per project)
Hub: IT
- Help Desk & Service Requests (communication site)
- Systems Status & Announcements (communication site)
- IT Knowledge Base (communication site)
- IT Team Workspace (team site — restricted)
This gives you roughly 15–18 sites total — manageable for a small IT team, clear enough for employees to find what they need, and flexible enough to grow. Each hub provides consistent navigation and branding across its associated sites. News flows up from individual sites to hubs and from hubs to the home site.
For more examples of how mid-sized teams have implemented this model, browse our SharePoint intranet examples and our detailed guide on SharePoint intranet best practices for mid-size teams. To see how Nexinite approaches intranet architecture for clients, visit our modern intranet solutions page.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many SharePoint sites should an intranet have?
Most mid-sized organizations (200–500 employees) need 15–20 sites: one home site, 3–5 hub sites, and 10–15 communication and team sites spread across those hubs. The right number depends on how many departments need their own publishing space and how many teams need dedicated collaboration sites. Start lean and expand based on actual demand rather than anticipated need.
Should I use subsites in a modern SharePoint intranet?
No. Microsoft recommends flat architecture for modern SharePoint intranets, where each site is its own site collection connected to a hub site via association — not physical nesting. Subsites create rigid URL structures, complicate permissions, and prevent you from reorganizing sites between hubs. If you’ve inherited subsites from a classic SharePoint environment, plan a migration to flat sites.
What’s the difference between a hub site and a home site?
A hub site groups related sites under shared navigation and branding — you typically have 3–5 hubs for major functional areas like HR, IT, and Operations. A home site is the single designated landing page for your entire intranet. There’s only one home site per tenant, and it’s typically your Corporate hub or a dedicated intranet homepage. Registering a home site also enables Viva Connections integration with Microsoft Teams.
How do I keep intranet content from going stale?
Assign a named content owner to every communication site during the planning phase. Build a quarterly content review cadence where owners verify their pages are current. Use SharePoint’s news scheduling and expiration features to automate freshness. Aggregate content from department sites to the homepage so the intranet always surfaces recent material — even if a single site hasn’t been updated in weeks.
Your SharePoint intranet structure is the decision that shapes every other decision — design, navigation, governance, adoption. Get the architecture right, and everything else becomes simpler. Get it wrong, and no amount of design polish will save the experience.
If your organization is planning a new intranet or restructuring one that isn’t working, we can help. Reach out for a free consultation — we’ll review your current SharePoint environment and recommend a structure that fits your team size, your departments, and how your people actually work.
Written by the Nexinite Team This article was written by the consulting and development team at Nexinite — a Microsoft Solutions Partner that has delivered over 75 SharePoint and Microsoft 365 projects since 2008. Our team includes certified Microsoft consultants, SharePoint developers, and project managers who build and optimize intranets for mid-sized organizations across the U.S. Learn more about our team.