How to Build a SharePoint Intranet in 2026: A Step-by-Step Guide

You build a SharePoint intranet in two stages. First, plan the audiences, tasks and content owners it must serve. Then build it in Microsoft 365. Set a communication site as the home site and connect hub sites. Add task-based navigation, news, permissions and audiences, and surface it all in Teams through Viva Connections. A mid-sized organisation typically needs 8 to 14 weeks.

Last updated: 10 October 2026

Most guides stop after "create a communication site". This guide also covers what usually goes wrong after that: permissions, content migration, accessibility, Copilot readiness and licensing.

What is a SharePoint intranet?

A SharePoint intranet is a private company website built on SharePoint Online inside your Microsoft 365 tenant. It gives employees one place for company news, policies, documents, people and tools. Because it runs in your own tenant, it uses the same sign-in, permissions and security controls as the rest of Microsoft 365. There is no separate platform to host or secure.

A SharePoint intranet is usually made of three building blocks:

• A home site. The front door of the intranet, built as a communication site.
• Hub sites. Department or regional sites grouped under shared navigation and branding.
• Viva Connections. The layer that brings the intranet into Microsoft Teams on desktop and mobile.

Teams handles day-to-day collaboration. The intranet handles information everyone needs. Our guide on when to use SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams for company documents explains where each belongs.

What should you plan before you build a SharePoint intranet?

Plan four things before you open SharePoint: the business goals, the audiences, the top employee tasks and the content owners. Skipping this step is the main reason intranets go stale within a year. A page without an owner is out of date within months. A navigation built around departments, rather than tasks, makes people search instead of click.

Set measurable goals

Write two or three goals you can measure. Examples include "reduce HR policy questions by 30 percent" or "reach 80 percent of staff with leadership news each week". These goals decide which pages you build first.

Map your audiences

List every group that needs different content. Typical audiences are office staff, frontline staff, managers, new joiners and regional teams. Each audience later becomes a Microsoft 365 group or security group used for targeting.

List the top 20 employee tasks

Ask employees what they look for most. Use a short survey, five or six interviews and your help-desk ticket history. The answers usually include leave requests, payslips, policies, expense claims, IT help and the staff directory.

Name a content owner for every area

Every section needs a named owner and a review date. If nobody will own a section, do not build it yet. This single rule prevents most intranet decay.

How do you build a SharePoint intranet step by step?

You build the intranet in ten steps, in this order. Each step depends on the one before it. For example, navigation depends on your hub structure, and audience targeting depends on the groups you created during planning. Following the order avoids rework when you add departments later.

1. Create a communication site for the home page. Use a communication site, not a team site. Communication sites are designed to publish to many readers. Choose the site language carefully, because you cannot change the default language after creation.
2. Set it as the SharePoint home site. In the SharePoint admin centre, set the site as your organisation's home site. This makes it the landing page in the SharePoint app and the default dashboard source for Viva Connections.
3. Create hub sites for departments or regions. Register each department site as a hub, or associate it with one. Hubs share navigation, branding and news roll-up without copying content.
4. Design task-based navigation. Build global navigation from the employee task list, such as "Pay and benefits", "Get IT help" and "Policies". Keep menus to three levels or fewer.
5. Apply branding. Set a theme from your brand colours, then add your logo and footer. Check colour contrast at this stage, not after launch.
6. Build the homepage. Add news, quick links, events, a people search and one or two personalised areas. Our SharePoint intranet homepage best practices cover layout in detail.
7. Set up news publishing. Decide who can publish company news and who approves it. Turn on page approval for the home site if legal or communications must review posts.
8. Configure permissions and audience targeting. Give most staff read access to the home site. Target navigation links, news posts and web parts to the audiences you defined.
9. Add Viva Connections in Teams. Add the Viva Connections app to Teams and pin it for all users. Build a dashboard of cards for frequent tasks.
10. Test with real tasks, then launch. Ask ten employees to complete five real tasks each. Fix whatever slows them down before announcing the launch.

How should permissions and audiences work on a SharePoint intranet?

Use permissions to control who can see content, and audience targeting to control who is shown content. They are different tools. Permissions are a security boundary: a person without access cannot open the page. Audience targeting is a relevance filter: a person outside the audience can still find the page through search or a direct link.

A simple, durable model looks like this:

Avoid breaking permission inheritance on individual pages and folders. Each break creates a hidden exception that someone must remember later. Our guide to SharePoint document library permissions explains how to keep sharing manageable.

How do you move existing content into a new SharePoint intranet?

Move content in three passes: inventory, clean-up, then migration. Most organisations find that 30 to 50 percent of old intranet content is outdated or duplicated. Migrating it unchanged recreates the old problems on a new platform. Content that nobody has opened in two years should usually be archived, not moved.

1. Inventory. Export a list of every page and file, with owner, last-modified date and view count.
2. Decide. Mark each item as keep, rewrite, merge or archive.
3. Migrate. Move files with the SharePoint Migration Tool or a third-party tool. Rebuild key pages rather than copying their layout.
4. Redirect. Point old links to the new pages so bookmarks keep working.

If you are moving from SharePoint Server 2016 or 2019, support for both ended on 14 July 2026. Our SharePoint 2016 and 2019 end-of-support migration guide covers the upgrade paths.

How do you make a SharePoint intranet ready for Copilot?

A SharePoint intranet is Copilot-ready when its content is current, owned and correctly permissioned. Microsoft 365 Copilot answers questions from content the user can already access. Therefore, outdated policies produce outdated answers, and over-shared files can surface in answers to people who should not see them.

Three checks matter most:

• Remove duplicates. One current version of each policy, with older versions archived.
• Fix over-sharing. Review sites shared with "Everyone except external users" that hold sensitive files.
• Add review dates. Give every policy page an owner and a next-review date.

Our AI-ready intranet checklist lists the full set of checks.

What licences does a SharePoint intranet need?

Every employee who uses the intranet needs a Microsoft 365 licence that includes SharePoint Online. Most business, enterprise and frontline plans include it, so many organisations already own everything required. Viva Connections is included in these plans too. Microsoft 365 Copilot is a separate licence and is optional for the intranet itself.

Prices are Microsoft list prices on annual commitment and vary by region and agreement. Microsoft 365 Copilot remains a separate add-on at $30 per user per month.

When is out-of-the-box SharePoint not enough?

Out-of-the-box SharePoint is enough for a clear, functional intranet with news, pages, documents and navigation. It falls short when you need a strong brand design, personalised dashboards, recognition, onboarding journeys or policy acknowledgement tracking. At that point you can add a ready-made product, commission custom SharePoint Framework (SPFx) web parts, or combine both.

Common gaps in standard SharePoint include:

• Birthday, anniversary and recognition feeds
• Onboarding checklists for new joiners
• Policy "read and understood" tracking with reminders
• Pixel-level brand design that looks like your public website
• Combined dashboards that pull from HR or ERP systems

The comparison of out-of-the-box versus custom SPFx web parts shows which gaps justify custom work. Sangha, our SharePoint intranet product, installs these components inside your own tenant.

How long does it take to build a SharePoint intranet?

A focused intranet built from a template takes 4 to 6 weeks. A custom-designed intranet for a mid-sized organisation takes 8 to 14 weeks. Planning and information architecture take the first 2 to 4 weeks. Build and content take 4 to 6 weeks. Testing, training and launch take the final 2 to 4 weeks.

Timelines slip for three common reasons:

• Content owners are named late, so pages wait for text.
• Brand approval takes several rounds.
• Migration starts before the clean-up decisions are made.

What should a SharePoint intranet launch checklist include?

A launch checklist confirms that the intranet works for real users, on real devices, with real content. Run it one week before launch. Fix every failed item before you announce the intranet, because first impressions decide whether employees come back.

• Every page has a named owner and review date
• Top 20 tasks can be completed in three clicks or fewer
• Search returns the right page for the top 20 task queries
• Pages pass colour-contrast and screen-reader checks (WCAG 2.1 AA)
• Mobile layout tested in the SharePoint app and Teams
• Viva Connections pinned in Teams for all users
• Old intranet links redirect to the new pages
• Usage analytics baseline recorded for week one

Our SharePoint intranet accessibility checklist covers the accessibility items in detail.