How to prevent users from associating a site to your Hub

So you created your Hub Site, associated a few sites to it, create Hub navigation. But, how do you make sure others do not add their site to your beautiful Hub? In this article, I would like to explain how you can prevent users from associating a site to your Hub while designating certain “approved” users as well.

Who can associate a site to the Hub?

Anyone with a Full Control or Site Collection Administrator access to the associated site can associate a site to any available Hub Site. The user does not even need to have any access to the Hub Site at all to associate with it.

To learn more about different roles and specifically, the difference between Full Control or Site Collection Administrator access, check out this post.

How to prevent users from associating a site to your Hub

So by default, as long as the user is the Owner or Site Collection Administrator of their site/site collection, he/she can join your Hub Site without your permission. They do not even need to have access to your Hub site! So, how do we control this? Let me explain.

How to restrict users’ ability to associate sites when you create a new Hub Site

When you create a new Hub Site, and specify a Hub Name, there is a field for you available where you can designate who can associate a site to the Hub. If you leave it blank, then anyone can add the site to the Hub. If you specify name(s), then only those individuals can associate a site to the Hub and no one else.

How to restrict users’ ability to associate sites after the Hub Site has been created

Once the Hub Site has been created, you can modify the Hub Settings from the SharePoint Admin Center to grant or revoke users’ ability to associate a site to the Hub.

NOTES:

• If you specify the names of users who can associate their sites to the Hub, the rest of the users will be excluded from such an ability
• If users have been restricted from associating a site to the Hub, they will not see the Hub name in the list of available hub sites to associate with in the drop-down
• When specifying who can associate a site to the Hub, you can list user names, security groups, mail-enabled security groups, or Microsoft 365 Groups (formerly Office 365 Groups). By the way, learn more about the difference among all sorts of groups here.