SharePoint Online – Hub sites and global navigation placeholders

Global navigation

Recently I created a hub site for a new intranet. Initially the idea was to create a global navigation that would match the navigation needed by my client, however only a limited number of navigation options would have real links. As my client was happy with the general structure we decided to add a few more real sites behind the links in the navigation. Quite quickly I ran into the problem where it wasn’t possible to update the links.

The I tried in my personal tenant to replicate the same problem and I found that I was able to edit some links. There are now error warnings at all, but the updates simply don’t happen.

This is weird!

After some more testing I found that I defaulted a lot of the links to the hub site’s home address (in the above example /sites/intranet) and this is the cause of the problem!

How to update links?

When you have links added to your hub site navigation that point at the hub site’s own url then it isn’t possible to update the url. So far the only option I’ve found is to add a new link and remove the original link. Not too much of a problem, but it is a bit of a pain. If you don’t want to do this you could also use PnP PowerShell to update the links, by collecting a template for the site, adjusting the links and then apply the template again.

One way to avoid this problem is of course simple to find. Do not use the hubsite’s url as your default dummy site url.

Ariel Kropp also suggested an alternative option using headers rather than links avoiding the issue as well.