Site > Space > Page. This is how your Confluence is structured. Site for the business, spaces for teams, and pages for more detailed work. Although the structure is there to guide you, we often fall into the same traps, especially with pages: Creating too many, updating and organizing too little. There are a lot of ways to properly organize your Confluence pages, one of which is, of course, page tree.
But let’s face it, page trees if managed poorly can become the problem. You’ve probably navigated one yourself—clicking through a labyrinth of pages, unsure where to find the information you need. It doesn’t need to be this way.
So, how do you fix this? There’s no magic formula, but there are best practices that can help transform your Confluence page tree into a well-organized, and easy-to-navigate. In this post, we’ll explore seven simple tips to better structure your Confluence page tree.
Why Is Structuring Your Confluence Page Tree Important?
Before we dive into the how, let’s start with the why. Why should you care about structuring your page tree? The answer is simple: clarity and efficiency. A clear, well-organized page tree makes it easier for your teams to navigate their spaces, find relevant content, and collaborate more effectively. It eliminates confusion and saves time spent searching for information. Time that can be otherwise spent on more productive tasks.
How to Properly Create and Manage your Confluence Page Tree?
1. Start with a Clear Hierarchy
When it comes to Confluence, structure is everything. Start by defining a clear hierarchy for your space. Here, you need to understand the space purpose and users who will be navigating the space. The good thing with Confluence is that you’ve got a host of templates to choose from, which can give you some sample pages and pre-built page tree to build upon.
Think of your page tree like a table of contents: main topics should act as parent pages, with subtopics nested as child pages. For example, if you’re managing a marketing team space, your top-level pages might be “Product Marketing”, “Social Media Marketing”, “Meeting Notes,” and so on. Child pages could then be specific reports, updates, or documentation related to each section.
2. Establish Clear Guidelines for Creating and Managing Page Trees
With your page tree structure in place, you need all involved parties to follow the same guidelines. Put in place a set of rules that answer the following questions: When to create new parent pages? Where to include new child pages? And What’s the max depth of a page tree?
For example, a new parent page might only be created when introducing a general topic or a body of work such as function, or a specific project that doesn’t fit under existing pages. When creating new child pages, always make sure to create within the specific parent page with the right naming.
By putting these guidelines in place, you’ll reduce the risk of having chaotic, unmanageable page trees and ensure that your Confluence spaces remain clear, organized, and efficient.
3. Identify Page Tree Managers
Who will be responsible for managing the page tree? The last thing you want is for anyone to get involved. Obviously the intentions are good, but you kind of have to keep records of the changes. And when too many people are involved this can quickly become a problem.
One effective way to maintain order is to assign specific users the responsibility of managing the page tree. This can be anyone really provided they know the proper way to organize pages. They can bring changes to the tree structure, monitor changes, delete or archive pages and keep everything up-to-date. Having dedicated page tree managers also ensures accountability and consistency in maintaining the organization of your Confluence space.
4. Limit the Depth of Your Page Tree
How much is too much? How many parent pages should I have? And how many levels to include? Too many “How many’s”, but the answer is simple: Don’t overcomplicate things. If you find yourself adding child pages to child pages and reaching like 5 levels. There’s something wrong.
While nesting pages is useful, over-nesting can make navigation frustrating. If your page tree has too many levels, it can become messy and hard to follow. Try to limit the depth of your page tree to a max three or maybe four levels. Beyond that, consider breaking up your content into separate, standalone spaces or sections within your Confluence site.
5. Use Consistent Naming Conventions
When navigating a page tree, it is important to grasp the content of the page and the project it’s part of with just the title. So what should page titles include? Obviously what the page is about, acronym for the team or project, dates if applicable.
Use clear, descriptive, and uniform naming conventions for your pages. Avoid vague or overly complex titles. Instead of naming a page “Q3 Content,” opt for something like ” MKG 2024 Q3 Content Plan” to make it instantly recognizable. This not only helps with navigation but also improves search since your teams will be using a host of criteria to find information such as the dates, creation period, etc.
6. Customize your Page Tree:
Confluence page trees come with a host of filtering options to help you fine tune the view and make navigation simpler. Say you’ve a page tree with hundreds or thousands of pages, and I only visit just a couple. You can simply change the filter from “Default” to “My views” to only showcase the pages you’re most interested in when you visit the space next time.
7. Leverage Dedicated Macros to Embed Page Trees
While the left-hand navigation panel is the default way to access page trees, you can take things a step further by embedding them directly into your pages with the Page Tree macro. This is especially helpful in the context of a space homepage, when you’ve too many layers, etc.
For example, if you’re managing a space with different parent pages, you can simply embed a section starting with one specific parent page.
This allows everyone to have quick access to the most relevant content without needing to navigate through multiple layers of pages
The Page Tree macro also comes with a range of customization options. You can choose which root page to start from, set depth levels, and filter by a host of criteria including creation date, position, and more.
8. Regularly Audit and Prune Your Pages
Just like a tree really, your Confluence page tree needs regular pruning. Try to conduct periodic audits to ensure that pages are still relevant in general, relevant to your teams, and correctly categorized. Here you can use Confluence Analytics to understand which pages are most visited and by whom. If the target audience for a specific set of pages are no longer accessing the page. This might suggest that there is a problem to search for it, reach it, or simply the content is no longer relevant.
Archive or delete outdated content when needed, change page statutes, update page titles, and so on. This keeps your Confluence space well-organized, and your team well informed.
9. Give Confluence Folders a Try:
I’ve always wondered why there were no folders in Confluence. Sure you’ve got parent pages and all, but they’re pages that I need to fill and regularly update. And the issue here is that too many people just create parent pages to act as folders, and leave them empty. Suffice to say, that’s not ideal. But that’s a thing of the past now because Confluence Folders are here (in Beta at least). So when should I use Confluence folders? And when parent pages are more suitable? The short answer is context. If you just want a container in which to add pages, use folders. If you want to provide more context about the child pages included, then parent pages are the way to go.
10. Take it a Step Further with Page Statutes:
Confluence page trees are great and all but they’re lacking one fundamental feature: Showing page statues directly from the left navigation menu. Sure upon accessing a page you can check out the page status just at the top.
For a holistic view that allows you to filter your pages by status, you can either use the Confluence brand new Content Manager (available for Enterprise and Premium plan), or give our very Content Status for Confluence a try. Both provide you with a holistic dashboard in which you can use a host of criteria to properly organize your pages including, of course, status, date, creation date, creator, and more.
And there you have it. Confluence page trees are designed to help you facilitate navigation and make content easier to access. But they’re only a fraction of what makes a good space experience. For more tips on how to properly create and manage your Confluence, make sure to check out our blog, and posts on Atlassian Community.
