How should we structure SharePoint sites and hubs?

Key facts

• Modern SharePoint favors a flat architecture of separate sites over nested subsites.
• Hub sites connect related sites with shared navigation, theme and scoped search without changing their permissions.
• Communication sites suit publishing to many readers; team sites, often connected to Teams, suit groups that work together.
• The site is the natural boundary for permissions, retention, sensitivity labels and ownership.
• A site can join only one hub, but hubs can be associated to each other for navigation.

Why flat beats nested

Older SharePoint designs built deep trees of subsites under one top-level site. That made permissions inherit in confusing ways, made reorganizations painful and tied unrelated content together. Modern SharePoint is designed around flat, separate site collections that you connect with hubs and navigation.

A flat design lets each site have its own owners, permissions, sensitivity label, retention and lifecycle. When a department reorganizes, you move a site to a different hub instead of restructuring a tree. It also lines up with Microsoft Teams, where each team gets its own site.

Choose the right site type

Communication sites are for a small group of authors publishing to a large audience: the intranet home, HR policies, IT news, a department landing page. Team sites are for people who collaborate on content together, and are usually connected to a Microsoft 365 group and a team.

Decide per need rather than per department. A department often has one communication site for what it publishes to everyone and one or more team sites for internal work.

Use hub sites for navigation and search

A hub site is a site that other sites associate with. Associated sites pick up the hub's navigation bar and theme, news and content can roll up to the hub, and search from the hub can be scoped to its associated sites. Hubs do not grant access; each associated site keeps its own permissions, although hub owners can optionally sync hub visitors to associated sites.

Common patterns are a hub per major function, such as Operations, Finance, People and Sales, plus one for the intranet home. Keep the number of hubs small enough that the navigation stays meaningful. Associating hubs to other hubs lets you build broader navigation without nesting sites.

• Register hubs by function or region, not by org chart boxes that change often.
• Limit who can create hubs and who can associate sites to them.
• Use the SharePoint home site and global navigation for company-wide links.
• Roll up news from department sites to the hub and intranet home.

Plan names, owners and permission boundaries

Before creating sites, write a short catalog: site name, URL, purpose, type, hub, owners, sensitivity label and who should have access. A clear URL convention helps admins and search. Assign at least two owners per site.

Use the site as the permission boundary wherever possible. If one library needs very different access from the rest of the site, that is usually a sign it belongs on its own site. Broken inheritance on folders and files is hard to audit and is a common source of oversharing that Copilot can surface.

Roll out in stages

Start with the intranet home, the hubs and the busiest department sites. Migrate or reorganize content into those, set navigation, and test search from each hub. Then add remaining sites in waves, using the catalog as the plan. Revisit the structure after a few months of use; analytics and owner feedback will show which navigation links and sites people actually use.

How Accred Consulting approaches it

Accred Consulting designs SharePoint information architecture as part of governance and migration engagements. Discovery assesses existing sites, file shares, permissions and how teams work, and the proposal sets scope, fixed price and timeline. The US-based specialists assigned to your engagement build the site catalog, hubs, navigation, naming, sensitivity labels and owner model, then migrate or reorganize content in waves. In one engagement for about 240 users, about 1.8 TB was assessed and organized into 11 governed sites in 9 weeks. Handover includes documentation and knowledge transfer, with optional support retainers.

Track record: 475+ client projects, 2,000+ migration workstreams and 210,000+ users migrated by a US-based team. Company facts · Case studies

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