Updating Communication sites subsites home pages

The new SharePoint Communication Sites are great and are going to be really helpful for people wanting to create a ‘cool intranet’ (you wouldn’t believe how many times I get asked this. So, what’s cool again? Is my response).

However, one of the current issues I came across when you want to create subsites from the root of a new Communication Site is that these subsites don’t have a similar look and feel by default. In fact they have the ‘classic’ appearance as you can see above.

That can be a bit jarring because you kind of expect everything from the root down to be all modern. However, swapping the default ‘classic’ homepage to a ‘modern’ page isn’t too hard. Here’s how to do it.

Once you have created the subsite from the root Communications Site locate the Pages option from the Quick Launch menu on the left of the new subsite and select it.

This will take you to the location where SharePoint keeps all the Site Pages. The current homepage for the site is the one called home.aspx.

Now select the New menu option at the the top of the page.

From the menu that appears select Site Page.

You’ll then be taken to a new ‘modern’ page that you can edit to make it display the way you want. Be default, the actual name of the page will be the name you use in the heading.

When you have completed working on the page Save and Publish it as you would normally.

You should be returned to the list of pages and you should now see a new one as shown above. In this case it is called finance.aspx.

Select the new file just created by placing a check mark to the left of the file name and then from the menu that appears across the top select the ellipse (three dots). From the menu that appears, select Make homepage. The same option is also available if you right mouse click on the file.

If you now navigate to the homepage of the subsite you should see the page you just created.

You have now successfully replaced the default ‘classic’ style homepage with ‘modern’ version that is more in keeping with the look and feel of Communications Sites.