Communication sites and team sites

A communication site is built for broadcasting: a few authors publish to a wide readership, so it uses horizontal top navigation, supports a footer and full-width page sections, and is the right choice for an intranet homepage, department portal or policy hub. A team site is built for collaborating: everyone contributes, so it uses left-hand navigation, connects to a Microsoft 365 group and usually to a Team, and suits project and working-group spaces. The practical test is the ratio of authors to readers.

Communication sites, for anything people read rather than work in. Intranet homepages, department portals, HR and IT service pages, policy libraries and news sites are all communication sites, because they need horizontal navigation, a footer, and full-width page sections for banners. Team sites remain the right choice for the project and working-group spaces that sit behind that intranet, where the people using the site are also the people producing its content.

A site template applies structure and configuration, not content and not permissions. It can create lists and libraries with their columns and views, add and lay out pages with web parts, apply a theme, set navigation, and trigger actions such as joining a hub. It does not copy documents, list items or news posts, and it does not carry permissions or group membership. Expect a correctly structured empty site rather than a duplicate of the one you based it on.

Not through the interface. There is no supported button that changes one site type into the other, and the differences run deeper than appearance — navigation position, footer availability and full-width sections are all tied to the type. In practice organisations create a new communication site and move content into it, which is why choosing the type correctly at creation matters more than most other early decisions.

Up to 25 TB per site collection, which is far more than most intranet sites will ever use. The limits that actually bite are structural rather than capacity: 2,000 lists and libraries combined per site collection, 2,000 subsites per site collection, and around 5,000 pages and news items per site as a performance recommendation. Storage is rarely the constraint on a SharePoint estate; list count and page count are.

Generally no. Microsoft’s modern guidance is to keep the estate flat and use hub sites for structure rather than nesting sites inside each other. A subsite inherits its parent’s permissions and is difficult to move, resecure or hand to a different owner later, whereas an associated site stays independent with its own permissions and storage. The technical ceiling is 2,000 subsites per site collection, but the architectural recommendation is to avoid them for new work.

No. Full-width sections are a communication site page layout feature and are not offered on team site pages. This is why a Hero web part on a team site cannot stretch edge to edge, and why full-bleed banners only appear on communication sites. If the full-width option is missing from the section layout control, that indicates you are on a team site rather than a configuration or permissions problem.

Microsoft ships a set of ready-made templates for both site types, covering scenarios such as a department site, an event, a project, a training programme, a crisis management site and a leadership connection site. They can be applied at creation or to an existing site of the matching type. They are a reasonable starting structure rather than a finished design, and most organisations replace the supplied page layouts while keeping the list and library structure.