On modern SharePoint sites there are three different layout options available.

  • Home Page Layout, which is default layout of site’s welcome page and has no page header section
  • Article Page Layout, which has a page header section and is default layout for pages and news
  • Single Web Part App Page Layout, which allows utilizing page canvas with customized web part

There have been several questions about is it possible to save and use page templates without header section. There are currently four header section layouts and header section cannot be hidden on pages or news, because they are using Article Page Layout. Layout cannot be chosen when promoting a page as template and site’s welcome page doesn’t have an option for promoting it as a template.

But there are couple of tricks you can use to create a page template using Home Page Layout.

Option #1 Out-of-the-Box Way

First, make a copy of site’s welcome page (Home.aspx) on SitePages library.

After page is copied, rename the copied page (not mandatory, but helps to identify it later and open it. Add sections, web parts and content to the template and choose Save as template.

Give a name to your template and click Save page template.

Now your template is ready and you can test it. Just create a new page or news article, and choose newly create template.

On edit mode page header section is available for adding a page name. After publishing a page, just hit F5 and header section disappears. If you need to edit page’s title, you need to do it also on file properties.

Page template can be modified afterwards by navigation to Templates folder on Site Pages library, but you cannot edit template’s title in template edit mode. If you need to change template’s title, you can change by editing file’s properties.

Last thing to do is to remove page copied (and renamed) in the first step.

Option #2: SP Editor browser extension – even more simple

With SP Editor you can directly change the layout of any saved template with just couple of clicks.

Just open a template from Templates folder on Site Pages library. Switch the layout to Home Page Layout, click Update and hit F5. Now your template is ready.

With SP Editor, it’s also easy to change template’s title. Just switch template layout to Article Page Layout, change the title and switch layout page to Home Page Layout.

Creating a second template with Home Page Layout

Creating a second template with Home Page Layout is simple. Just create a start creating a new page using template created earlier with Home Page Layout and click Save as template. Done.

Why?

Be careful when using Home Page Layout on multiple pages on your site. End-user can only tell by the URL of page, where he/she actually is and it might be confusing. So, take care of the navigation between page and, if page is a content page, provide a header to a page using out-of-the-box content web parts, like Hero, Text or Callout, or some customized functionality.

There are still some use cases where this might be useful.

  • Building a search result page with modern search web parts
  • Page starting with Hero
  • Page with vertical section and custom header

Need for using Home Page Layout is for some special cases and it may not be reasonable to create a template for that. I wouldn’t suggest using Home Page Layout for all of your pages on a site and with content pages with care.

I would heavily suggest to use SP Editor browser extension for changing just a layout of a single page, if needed. Extension is free and frequently updating with new features, and you can do a lot more with it. You can find more information about it here: https://github.com/tavikukko/Chrome-SP-Editor.