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Set a site as your home site

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A home site is a SharePoint communication site that you create and set as the main landing site for your intranet. It brings together news, events, embedded video and conversations, and other resources to deliver an engaging experience that reflects your organization's voice, priorities, and brand. It also allows your users to search for content (such as sites, news, and files) across your organization. You can set the home site in the SharePoint admin center or by using PowerShell.

Before you begin, make sure you've reviewed how to plan, build, and launch a home site.

Note

You can set only one site in your organization as a home site. The site can be registered as a hub site, but can't be associated with a hub. The first time you set up a home site, it might take up to several minutes for the changes to take effect. If you run the command again to switch your home site to a different site, it might take up to 2 hours.

Important

If you want your home site to also be the root site, or top-level site of your intranet, first replace your root site with the site, and then set up the home site. If you set up a home site first, and then replace it with your root site, you may lose home site settings and need to reapply them.

Use the SharePoint admin center

After you create and customize the communication site that you want to use as your home site, follow these steps to set it as your home site.

  1. Go to Settings in the SharePoint admin center, and sign in with an account that has admin permissions for your organization.

    Note

    If you have Office 365 operated by 21Vianet (China), sign in to the Microsoft 365 admin center, then browse to the SharePoint admin center and open the Settings page.

  2. Select Home site.

    Home site setting in the new SharePoint admin center.

  3. Paste the URL of the communication site that you want to become the home site.

  4. Select Save.

On the Settings page, the home site URL will appear in the Current value column.

Note

It might take up to 10 minutes for the change to take effect and the Global navigation and Set up Viva Connections options to appear.

Use PowerShell

Follow these steps if you want to use PowerShell to set your home site. To run this cmdlet, you must be a site admin of the site.

  1. Download the latest SharePoint Online Management Shell.

    Note

    If you installed a previous version of the SharePoint Online Management Shell, go to Add or remove programs and uninstall "SharePoint Online Management Shell."

  2. Connect to SharePoint as a Global Administrator or SharePoint Administrator in Microsoft 365. To learn how, see Getting started with SharePoint Online Management Shell.

  3. Run Set-SPOHomeSite -HomeSiteUrl <siteUrl>.

    (Where siteUrl is the site you want to use)

Tip

After you set your home site, you might want to enable and customize the global navigation.

Remove a site as your home site

If you remove a site as your home site:

  • The Home button will be removed from the Find tab of the SharePoint mobile app.
  • If you enabled global navigation, the global navigation pane will be removed from the SharePoint app bar.
  • Search will be scoped to the site only.

To remove the site as your home site:

  1. Go to Settings in the SharePoint admin center.
  2. select Home site.
  3. Next to your current home site, select Remove as home site.
  4. Select Save.

To perform this task by using PowerShell, run Remove-SPOHomeSite.

The site will continue to be an organization news site. To remove it as an organization news site, see Create an organization news site.

Add a home site after you’ve set up Viva Connections

If your organization is already using Viva Connections, you can add a home site at any time. If you add a home site after you’ve set up content in the Viva Connections dashboard and navigation in Microsoft Teams, you may need to copy some content to the home site in some cases. Learn more about how Viva Connections and home sites work together to create employee experiences.

To add a home site after setting up Viva Connections:

  1. Go to Settings in the SharePoint admin center, and sign in with an account that has admin permissions for your organization.
  2. Select Home site.
  3. Add the URL for the communication site that you want to be a home site.
  4. The new home site will automatically be in draft mode, which allows you to copy content from Teams to the home site if you've already customized content in the dashboard and in navigation (if needed). While in draft mode, the Viva Connections experience will continue to source content from Teams.
  5. Confirm that the home site is in draft mode, then select Save.
  6. Copy content from the Viva Connections dashboard and navigation in Teams to the dashboard and global navigation that can be found in the home site Settings.
    • To edit the dashboard from the home site, select Manage Viva Connections > Create dashboard.
    • To edit navigation from the home site, select Settings > Global navigation.
  7. Once content has been copied, turn Draft mode to Off and select Save. Once draft mode has been turned off, Viva Connections content will be sources from the home site and Viva Connections content can be edited from Teams too.

Add a home site after setting up Viva Connections using PowerShell:

  1. Download the latest SharePoint Online Management Shell.

Note

If you installed a previous version of the SharePoint Online Management Shell, go to Add or remove programs and uninstall "SharePoint Online Management Shell."

  1. Connect to SharePoint as a Global Administrator or SharePoint administrator. To learn how, see Getting started with SharePoint Online Management Shell.
  2. Run set-spohomesite

Choose the default landing experience for Viva Connections desktop

If your organization is using Viva Connections, and you already have a SharePoint home site that you want to keep as the landing experience for Viva Connections desktop, use the PowerShell command. Get more guidance on how to set the default desktop experience for Viva Connections.

Note

If you change the home site to a different home site, it may take up to a week for users in Viva Connections to be directed to the new site. However, users can logout and log back in to clear the cache to view the new home site sooner.

See also

Watch: Build and launch a SharePoint Home Site: Tips and Tricks From The Product Team

Creating and launching a healthy SharePoint portal

Use and customize the The Landing template from the SharePoint look book