SharePoint page design and web parts

Modern SharePoint pages are assembled in the browser from a library of web parts. The classic SharePoint Designer / publishing model is gone for new sites; pages are now blocks of structured content arranged in sections, designed to look right on any device.

Pages live on the sites described in team sites vs communication sites and communication sites deep dive; multilingual pages are in multilingual sites, custom web parts in the SPFx overview, and video embedding in Stream on SharePoint.

The page model

A page is a stack of sections. Each section has a column layout (one to three columns, plus full-width). Sections contain web parts — pre-built building blocks that pull in content of various kinds.

The web parts most pages use

• Text — rich text with headings, lists, links.
• Image — single image with alt text, captions, and basic styling.
• Hero — large image/news tile cluster, ideal for a landing page.
• Quick links — a grid of links with icons, used heavily on intranets.
• News — pulls in news posts from this site, the hub, or selected sites.
• People — a profile card grid.
• File and media — embed a document or video viewer.
• Highlighted content — query-driven roll-up of files or pages matching filters.
• Embed — paste any embeddable URL (YouTube, Power BI, Forms, Stream).
• Code snippet — for documentation pages.

Beyond these, the marketplace and custom SPFx (SharePoint Framework) web parts extend further.

Sections, columns, and layouts

A typical landing page layout:

1. Full-width hero section with site navigation and a call to action.
2. Two-column section with a news roll-up beside quick links.
3. Full-width events or embed section (calendar or Power BI dashboard).
4. Three-column people or link grid.
5. A footer with contacts and important documents.

Use section backgrounds to break up the page visually; use vertical sections for sidebars that float on the right.

News, pages, and articles

A news post is a page with the "News" template — it appears in the site's News rollup and the hub's news feed. A regular page doesn't. Both have the same authoring experience. News digest lets a site owner email a curated roundup of news.

Brand and theming

A communication site can be themed at the site level (colours, fonts) and inherits from a hub if associated. Tenant-wide branding (logo, app launcher header, browser tab favicon) lives in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

Keep pages simple. The hard part isn't picking web parts — it's keeping content fresh enough to be worth reading.

Web parts and Copilot grounding

Not every web part contributes equally to what Copilot can retrieve from a page. Text, Hero, and News web parts store genuinely extractable text that Copilot can ground answers on; Embed web parts (an iframe to an external service) and heavily image-based layouts contribute far less, since there's no underlying text for the index to crawl — a beautifully designed page built mostly from embeds and hero images can look complete to a human visitor while being close to invisible to Copilot's retrieval. For pages meant to answer real employee questions (an IT help page, an HR policy page), leaning on Text and structured content rather than image-heavy or embed-heavy layouts pays off doubly — better for search, and better for any AI-assisted retrieval built on top of it.

Frequently asked questions

Can a page be scheduled to publish at a future date, like a news article? Yes — modern SharePoint pages support scheduled publishing, letting an author finish a page ahead of time and have it go live (and appear in News rollups, if applicable) automatically at a specified date and time rather than needing someone to manually publish it at the right moment.

Do web parts work the same way across desktop and mobile? Most do, with layouts reflowing responsively — a three-column section collapses to a single column on a phone, for instance — but a handful of web parts (some third-party SPFx parts in particular) render poorly or are hidden entirely on mobile if they weren't built with responsive behaviour in mind, which is worth checking specifically for any custom or less common web part before relying on it for content mobile users need to see.