Hero web part

The Hero web part is the large visual banner at the top of most SharePoint intranet homepages. It presents up to five items, each with a background image, a headline, an optional description and a link, and it comes pre-loaded on the communication site template so most people meet it as the thing already sitting on a new site. It has three layouts — Tiles, Layers and Carousel — and it is used primarily as a visual navigation block rather than for holding content.

Five is the maximum in every layout: five tiles in Tiles, five layers in Layers, or five slides in Carousel. There is no setting to raise it. You can run it with fewer, and a single tile makes a clean full-width banner. If you need to promote more than five destinations, the usual approach is to pair the Hero with a Quick links or Highlighted content web part underneath rather than trying to fit everything into the banner.

Tiles arranges up to five items in a mosaic grid — one large tile with smaller ones beside it — which is the classic intranet homepage look and works best as a navigation block. Layers stacks items as full-width horizontal bands, giving each equal prominence and its own call to action, which suits showcases. Carousel rotates up to five slides in a single space with an optional autoplay toggle and three slide styles, which suits timely promotions.

There is no single correct pixel size, because the web part crops responsively for each layout and screen. The proportions differ by layout: in Tiles the web part holds an overall 8:3 shape and images scale to roughly 4:3, while in Layers each band is 8:3 with the image scaling nearer 9:16. Microsoft recommends source images of at least 1 MB, and at least 1920 pixels wide for anything spanning a full-width section. Set the focal point on each image so the important part survives cropping.

No. The Hero web part has no audience targeting, so you cannot show different tiles or layers to different groups of people. Every visitor sees the same banner. This is one of its most significant limitations on a homepage serving several populations — frontline and head office, or multiple regions — because the most prominent block on the page is the one that cannot be personalised. News, Quick links and Highlighted content do support audience targeting.

Only on communication sites. Full-width sections are a communication site page layout and are not available on team site pages, so a Hero on a team site cannot stretch edge to edge. To set it up, edit a communication site page, add a full-width section from the section layout control, and place the Hero inside it. If the full-width option is missing, that indicates a team site rather than an image or configuration problem.

Yes. A Hero item can link to or contain a video, and it plays inline on the page rather than sending people to a new window, working through the Microsoft Stream integration. A video tile is a common way to feature a leadership message or a campaign clip on a homepage. Bear in mind it counts as one of your five items, and video-led tiles need a still frame that reads well when the video has not started.

Yes. The Hero that arrives with a new communication site is an ordinary web part on the home page, so you can edit the page, select it and delete it like any other. Nothing about the site depends on its presence. Many organisations remove it precisely because it cannot be audience targeted, replacing it with a combination of web parts, or with a third-party component that offers targeting and more layout control.