When creating a SharePoint site, you can choose from a set of industry and functional templates provided by Microsoft itself, or custom templates created within your organization.
In this article, we are going to step through what site templates are, why they're useful, what kinds of templates are available, what's included in a site template, and how you can apply them.
What is a site template?
SharePoint site templates are a way to pre-define a useful combinations of lists, columns, navigation, layouts and pages and theming into a packaged format which can be recreated in a single step. A site template enables people to quickly and easily build multiple sites which have a similar purpose, without having to go through a long list of individual configuration steps each time.
Why are site templates useful?
Templates standardise the site creation and purpose alignment process and enable you to:
- Provide consistency - People working the same department or business unit often have very similar operational requirements. Templates enable a standard set of structure, functionality and layout to be used by individual and teams working within the same organizational groups.
- Save time - When a site needs to be created each time a new project is started, or a new client is onboarded, templates save precious time for the power users or administrators responsible for creating these sites.
- Prevent mistakes - Manually reproducing the same site functionality repeatedly carries the risk of configuration error, however small. Templates eliminate this risk by ensuring that every new site is created exactly as intended.
- Help people start with a purpose - Having pre-defined structure and functionality helps people to productively tackle their work, instead of having to spend time figuring out the framework first.
- Ensure regulatory compliance - If regulations determine that an organization always has to include specific metadata or lists in projects or departments, or has to provide employees with specific guidance, templates enable this functionality to be made available in a standardised way.
What types of templates are available?
Standard templates
Microsoft provides a set of templates as a generic starting point for sites across many different types of organizations. In addition to a generic standard team site, you can create sites for crisis communication, employee onboarding, event planning, project management, leadership connection and more (view the full list of templates).
These templates can be useful, but are seldom suitable to be used as-is because they do not include the specific functionality you may need within your team, department, or business unit.
Organizational templates
If you have specific template requirements, you can publish a set of custom organizational templates which include structure, functionality and layout designed for each area within your organization. Once published, these templates appear in the "From your organization" tab.
Custom organizational templates can be configured to a very granular level, but require a fair amount of time and technical knowledge to create and keep up to date. Unlike older versions of SharePoint (eg 2013, 2016, 2019), SharePoint Online does not enable you to save an existing site as a template, but there are several ways to create them.
What's included in a site template?
Site templates enable you to define various aspects of a site's structure, functionality, content, layout, navigation and theming. You can use a template to define various elements depending on the method you use.
- Lists and libraries
- Columns
- Views
- Folders
- Navigation
- Pages, including their contents *
- Permissions **
- External sharing settings
- Hub site association
- Regional settings
- Theme
- Site logo
* If using PowerShell templates or a third-party tool like SProbot
** If using a third-party tool like SProbot
How do you apply a site template?
Select a template when creating a site
When you create a site from the SharePoint start page, you have the option to create either a team or communication site, and can then select the template to use.
When you preview a template, you can see what capabilities the site will have, and what pages, lists and other elements it will include.
When you hit the Use template button and specify a name, URL and owner, SharePoint completes two steps in the background for you:
- A blank site is created (either group-connected or not, depending on your selection).
- The template you have selected is applied to the newly created site.
Apply a template to an existing site
Templates can be applied to existing sites by using Site settings > Apply a site template.
This method deploys all of the elements of the template to an existing site. Conflicts with existing content and structure are handled as follows:
- Existing lists and their items are left in place and not replaced by the template's lists of the same name.
- Existing pages are replaced by pages of the same name defined in the template. The existing page becomes the previous version, and the page from the template the current published version.
- Navigation items are adjusted according to the template's settings. This can mean hiding of standard items and replacement of existing items, but custom existing not defined in the template are left in place. The setting for horizontal/vertical navigation is not changed by the template.
- For sites associated to hubs, the site inherits the template's theme when the theme is applied, but automatically updates to the hub's theme shortly after republishing.
Use a provisioning & admin tool
A third-party administration tool like SProbot enables you to manage templates dynamically and without technical knowledge by using existing sites as sources for new site creation. When you create a template in SProbot, you configure:
- The source site which defines what the template structure and functionality should be. This method enables subject matter experts to maintain the source site as the definition of what the template is simply by editing it normally, instead of having to resort to scripts and other technical configuration.
- Settings which are applied in addition to the template. These include access control, hub, ownership, quota and other governance rules.
- Whether approval is required for the template to be used to create a new site.
SProbot can apply templates to both new and existing sites
When a new site needs to be created, you can use the Teams app to browse custom templates which have been made available to them based on the latest version of the maintained source site, see the settings which will be applied, and then request provisioning.
In the SProbot admin app, administrators can apply templates to existing sites based on advanced search and filter criteria, including the identification of sites based on their AI-determined purpose.
Using SProbot's templating functionality to provision sites and apply templates offers several advantages over the built-in Microsoft functionality:
- Templates can be managed in place as normal sites by template owners, without any technical knowledge required beyond normal site configuration.
- Sites created with a template can be categorised and grouped to enable management rules to be applied to them.
- Line managers can be automatically notified when new sites are created.
- Template availability can be limited to the audiences they are intended to serve. This is useful for department or business unit specific templates.
- Name and URL conventions can be defined to ensure that template-provisioned sites can be managed by policies in future.
- Ownership rules can be defined to ensure that more than one owner needs to be assigned at creation.
- Line managers can be automatically included as site admins on sites provisioned using templates they own.
- Guest access and other security settings can be defined at template level.
- Custom quota rules can be set.
- If approval is required before a site is created using a specific template, this can be enabled.
