How to Build a Personalised SharePoint Intranet Home Page

To build a personalised intranet home page in SharePoint, start with a communication site, lay out the page with the standard News, Quick links, Events, Sites and Recent documents web parts, then turn on audience targeting so each news post, link and menu item shows only to the groups it’s meant for. Sites and Recent documents personalise themselves: they show the frequent sites and recent files of whoever is signed in.

One of the questions I get asked most about intranets is what actually belongs on the home page. My answer is content that’s relevant to the person and their role, so they aren’t buried in every news post and event the organisation publishes. In the video above I build the whole page from a blank site in about half an hour. I recorded it in April 2023 and a few labels have changed since, so the steps below use the current names.

Before you start

• Use a communication site. Full-width sections only exist on communication sites, and the home page is a publishing page read by many and edited by a few. Team site vs communication site covers the difference.
• You need to be a site owner. Owners change the header, the navigation and the Site Pages library settings. Editors can then target individual links and posts.
• Have your groups ready. Audience targeting works with Microsoft Entra groups: security groups, Microsoft 365 groups and dynamic groups. In my demo tenant the security groups all start with SG, which makes them easy to find when you type.
• Know your page building blocks. If sections, columns and web parts are new to you, read the anatomy of a SharePoint page first.

How do you set up the header and navigation?

1. Select Settings (the gear), then Change the look, then Header.
2. Choose a layout: Minimal, Compact, Standard or Extended. I used Extended, the only one with a background image and logo alignment, with a plain white image as the background to keep the header clean.
3. Under Display, turn off the site title if your logo already says it, and add both logos. The site logo thumbnail is the square version used in roll-ups, search results and the Sites web part. The site logo is what shows in the header itself.
4. Set Site logo alignment to centre if you want it in the middle, then select Save.
5. Select Edit on the top navigation, remove the default links and add your own. Links to other sites need the full URL, because a relative address only works inside the current site. Add a Label instead of a link when you want a heading that groups other links underneath it.

When I add something new to the menu in my demo, I put a small “new” emoji at the start of its display name for a few weeks, so people spot it without an announcement.

How do you lay out the page?

In edit mode I deleted the default full-width section and its hero web part, then built the page in sections:

1. Add a vertical section. It sits down the right of the page, which makes it the natural home for personal content.
2. Add a one-third right section for featured news. Put a News web part on the left with the Carousel layout and the source set to Select sites, and a Quick links web part on the right for the everyday tasks: apply for leave, the staff directory, the policy hub, reports.
3. Add another one-third right section for department and service news. I used two more News web parts, Top story on the left and Side-by-side on the right, each pointed at different sites. A page can have as many News web parts as you like, each with its own source and layout.
4. Add a one-column section for events with the Events web part in the Compact layout.
5. Add a Quick links web part in the Grid layout for company and culture links, with stock images on each tile.
6. Change the section background on alternate sections, and on the vertical section, to break the page into layers. I used grey on the news section and the right-hand column.

Give each web part a short title that says what it holds. The News web part’s layouts and sources are covered in the SharePoint News web part, and for rolling up documents or pages by rule rather than by site, the Highlighted content web part does that job.

What goes in the personal column?

Two web parts in the vertical section do the personalising with no setup beyond a title:

• Sites, set to Frequent sites for current user. It shows the same sites the person sees on their SharePoint home page, so everyone gets a different list. I limited mine to four. The layouts today are Filmstrip, Cards and Compact, which have different names from the ones in the video. Each site appears with its site logo thumbnail, which is why step 3 of the header setup matters.
• Recent documents, which lists the files the signed-in person opened most recently. The only setting is how many to show. I put this one at the top of the column.

The example home page at the start of the video also has a Viva Connections dashboard in this column, with cards for leave balances and booking a health check.

How do you turn on audience targeting?

Targeting has to be enabled in more than one place. The toggle on a News web part does nothing until the Site Pages library gives each post an Audience property to filter on.

1. The Site Pages library. Go to Settings, Site contents, then Site Pages. In the library select Settings, then Audience targeting settings, tick Enable audience targeting and select OK. Every news post and page now has an Audience property.
2. Each News web part. Edit the web part and turn on Enable audience targeting in the Filter section of the properties pane. Do it on every News web part you want to filter.
3. Each news post. Open the post’s page details, add groups under Audience, then post or republish.
4. Quick links. Turn on Enable audience targeting in the web part’s properties, then edit a link and add groups under Audiences to target.
5. Events. The Events web part has the same toggle.
6. Navigation. Select Edit on the menu, turn on Enable site navigation audience targeting at the bottom and save. Then open a link’s menu (the three dots), select Edit and add groups.

In the demo I targeted a Resources quick link, an “IT department only” news post and an IT menu link at the SG-IT group, and left the company and culture links for everyone. Signed in as Megan, who isn’t in SG-IT, none of the three appeared.

Combine site permissions with audience targeting in the hub navigation

When you associate a site with a hub, it picks up the hub’s theme and shared navigation, but it isn’t added to the hub menu. You add the link yourself, and once you do, everyone sees it. People who aren’t members of a private team site click it and land on an access request.

Watch the video

The fix is to target the link at the people who already have access. In this demo I created an AU Sales team site, added it to the hub navigation, and targeted the link at two groups: a security group for sales and marketing, and the site’s own Microsoft 365 group. Megan saw the link once she was in the second group, and didn’t before. Microsoft’s hub planning guidance recommends the same approach for private sites.

Lock down the site first, then target the home page

Put the security on the site, and use audience targeting only to decide what’s worth showing on the home page. I build every personalised home page that way. A news post targeted at IT is hidden from the News web part for everyone else, but anyone with read access to the site can still open it from a link or find it in search. If a post is sensitive, it belongs on a site that only the right people can open, and the targeting just keeps the home page tidy. Setting folder permissions in SharePoint covers how inheritance works if you need to lock something down.

Copilot follows the same rule. Microsoft 365 Copilot works from permissions, so content you’ve targeted away from someone’s home page is still content Copilot can use when they ask a question, if they can open it.

I target with groups that someone already keeps up to date. The Microsoft 365 group behind a team site is a ready-made audience, and a dynamic group built from the Department field in Entra ID changes as people join, move and leave. A group built by hand for one menu link needs someone to remember it every time the team changes.

I’d also keep the home page in proportion. It’s for people browsing. When Copilot searches your environment, it works from the sites, libraries and metadata underneath, and your hero image and carousel play no part in its answers. Given the choice, I’d spend more time on the information architecture behind the intranet than on the home page layout.

What to watch for

• Changes need a republish. Targeting settings, page details and audiences only take effect after you publish or republish.
• New groups take time. A group you’ve just created or changed can take a while before targeting applies to it, so don’t test five minutes after adding someone.
• Test as a real user. Check the published page signed in as someone in the audience and someone outside it, the way I used Megan.
• Watch the menu size. Microsoft recommends no more than 100 links in a site’s navigation for usability and performance, even with targeting trimming what each person sees.

Frequently asked questions

Can I use SharePoint groups for audience targeting? Modern audience targeting is documented for Microsoft Entra groups: security groups, Microsoft 365 groups and dynamic groups. SharePoint groups like Site Members aren’t on that list. For a group-connected team site, target the site’s Microsoft 365 group instead.

Do dynamic groups work for navigation targeting? Not everywhere. Microsoft supports dynamic groups for audience targeting in general, but says they’re only partially supported in site navigation for some tenants, so test a dynamic group on a menu link before relying on it.

How many audiences can I target? Up to 50 audiences on a news post or page, and up to 10 Microsoft 365 or security groups on each navigation link. When you target a parent link in the menu, its sub-links only show to those groups too.

Why can I still see a targeted link when I’m not in the audience? Because you’re in edit mode. Editors see every item so they can manage it, and Quick links marks each targeted link with a small people icon. Publish the page and check it as someone outside the group.