People love to say SharePoint is not a website builder. They’re right, but they’re also stuck in 2007.

SharePoint didn’t start as a website builder. It started as a collaboration and document platform built around libraries, lists, permissions, and workflows. The early requests weren’t about brand palettes or slick layouts. They were about control, storage, and getting work done.

Then came the inevitable question: “Can you make it not look like SharePoint?” For years, functional came first and pretty was optional. When pretty required custom master pages, CSS overrides, and jQuery injections, it also meant fragile. Every cumulative update felt risky. Every UI refresh threatened to break something clever, and clever sometimes ages badly. I’ve written before about the hidden tax of over-customizing SharePoint. The platform moves. Your custom layer becomes technical debt with branding.

Modern SharePoint didn’t just improve visually. It matured structurally. Communication sites introduced a publishing model built for internal storytelling inside an authenticated, governed environment. Hub sites redefined architecture by encouraging flatter structures connected through association instead of brittle hierarchies. Shared navigation, rollups, and consistency at scale replaced deep nesting and subsite sprawl.

The biggest shift, though, wasn’t pages. It was positioning.

SharePoint didn’t grow into “a better intranet tool.” It became the content substrate of Microsoft 365. It powers the files behind Teams and OneDrive. It surfaces inside Viva Connections as the employee experience layer. It is indexed and security-trimmed through Microsoft Graph. And Copilot’s architecture makes it clear that SharePoint content sits at the core of how AI works across Microsoft 365.

This is also why weak structure doesn’t stay hidden for long. As I’ve said before, Copilot exposes your SharePoint mess the moment governance and lifecycle were treated as afterthoughts.

I’ve watched intranet platforms rise and fall. Drupal builds that took months. Jive rollouts that promised transformation. Confluence spaces that looked brilliant in demos. Many were good tools. But they were islands. They relied on connectors to approximate identity integration, search, governance, compliance, and now AI.

SharePoint doesn’t approximate Microsoft 365. It is embedded in it. That’s the difference.

Over time, the platform earned the right to be pretty because it proved it was dependable first. Modern pages are flexible without being brittle. Audience targeting personalizes without duplication. Multilingual publishing is built in, as Microsoft outlines in their guidance on multilingual SharePoint sites. Even small changes like emoji support in navigation have improved real-world wayfinding.

SharePoint is optimized for authenticated, governed, collaborative work at enterprise scale. It is not optimized for public SEO campaigns or pixel-perfect marketing control. When you judge it like a marketing CMS, it looks limited. When you judge it by integration, lifecycle, compliance depth, and ecosystem reach, it looks inevitable.

The platforms I’ve seen disappear weren’t ugly. They were disconnected. SharePoint didn’t win by being flashy. It won by becoming infrastructure. And once a platform becomes infrastructure, the question stops being “Is it pretty enough?” and becomes “What would realistically replace it without dismantling your digital workplace?”

That’s not a website conversation anymore. That’s a platform conversation.

And that realization leads directly into the final lesson of this series.

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This post is part of my 25 days of SharePoint series, created to celebrate SharePoint’s 25th anniversary and lead up to the SharePoint at 25 digital event on March 2.

Each post reflects on what actually made SharePoint last 25 years, the wins, the mistakes, and the lessons learned from building, breaking, and rebuilding it in real organizations.

You can find all posts in this series here.

If there’s a topic you think I should cover next, a SharePoint mistake you keep seeing, or a question no one ever answers straight, leave a comment. This series is shaped by real experiences, not marketing slides.