A SharePoint home site is the principal site on your modern SharePoint intranet grouping together news, events, a global navigation, and global search.

A home site is created from a modern communication site and despite being exclusively modern you will not find any interface in SharePoint to create it, the process must be done using PowerShell as explained below.

Before jumping into the home site creation process you must get the URL for your communication site, alternatively if you want to start from scratch you can create a new SharePoint communication site.

1. Start by downloading and installing the latest version of the SharePoint Online Management Shell from here
2. Connect to your tenant using the following cmdlet (replace the tenantName by your tenant)
   1. Connect-SPOService -url https://tenantName-admin.sharepoint.com
3. Execute the following cmdlet replacing the URL by your communication site
   1. Set-SPOHomeSite -HomeSiteUrl https://tenantName.sharepoint.com/sites/home

If you want to go a set further and define your new home site as the root site for your SharePoint tenant have a look to this article where the process is explained step by step.

Important things to remember about the SharePoint home site

• The creation of the SharePoint home site adds a home icon to the SharePoint mobile app for Android and iOS
• A SharePoint tenant only has 1 home site
• The home site can be changed to another existent communication site by rerunning the cmdlet on step 3 above providing the new site URL
• The search scope of the home site is defined global to the entire tenant
• The home site is created as an organization news website
• The home site allows you to define a global navigation that will be inherited by all modern sites in the tenant
• A home site is required to use Microsoft Viva connections in Microsoft Teams

This blog is part of SharePoint Week. For more great content, click here

With a degree in computer science I’ve been working with SharePoint over the last seven years, mainly focused on creating collaboration and productivity solutions that drive the adoption of Microsoft Modern Workplace.
A true tech enthusiast and author of “HANDS ON SharePoint” and “HANDS ON Teams” blogs I love to share my knowledge.

Reference:

Ferreira, J. (2021). How to create a SharePoint home site. Available at: https://sharepoint.handsontek.net/2021/03/17/create-sharepoint-home-site/ [Accessed: 12th September 2021].