Unique permissions not working for a subsite under a subsite

Question

The site setup goes like this. Top site ---> Subsite1--->Subsite1.1

Subsite1 is inheriting permissions from top site. Unique permissions are set for Subsite1.1 and due to that users on Subsite1.1 have "None" permissions on Subsite1 and Top site.

Now the problem is that the users of subsite 1.1 are not able to access this site. Whenever they try to access subsite 1.1, they get access denied error. I checked and it seems no unique permissions are set for Site Pages library or home.aspx. Whenever they are added to top site permissions , then only they are able to access subsite 1.1 which is not I want.

SharePoint 2013 is being used. Kindly help.

Answer 1

As the users of your Subsite1.1 have no permissions to Subsite1, they also don't have permissions to the Top site (<=> Top site's permissions are inherited to Subsite1). Because of this, your users also have no permissions to files essential to the site collection's system, which are hosted at the Top site level.

As discussed e.g. here, the users of your Subsite1.1-level need to be at least members of the Style Resource Readers permission group, which grants them sufficient rights to access the system files, but no more than that.

Also quoting myself from the other thread:

Slightly offtopic, but a rule of thumb when designing a site collection is to consider the user groups that should access the particular site. It's always recommended to have a top-to-down architecture, where users always have permissions to the parent site of a subsite.

Answer 2

I agree with MOE. Also, once you break the permissions, the SharePoint groups from top level site still exists. After you break the permissions, you should remove those groups and add the users manually to other (AD Groups - Preferred) to that site alone.