Here’s the scenario: You’re working on some Confluence pages for a specific project or team space. How would you organize your content so team members can easily access them? There are a host of options, you can use parent pages, folders, custom statutes, or LABELS. Each option has its pros and cons, but for proper organization and classification, Confluence labels are your best bet. In this article, we’ll explore why Confluence labels are important, how to get started, along with, of course, some best practices.
What are Confluence labels & why do they matter?
Simply put, Confluence labels help you better classify and organize content across your Confluence site. Unlike other native features like hierarchy and folders, labels are more flexible, easy to implement, and maintain. They offer you mulch more room for customization and are perfect when you want to group content from different spaces.
For example, if you’re dealing with cross-functional projects, the content might reside within multiple spaces. In this case, team members will have to toggle between those spaces to find what they’re looking for. With labels, content can be grouped together under specific shared labels for easy access.
This is, of course, one simple example to showcase how and when labels might be used. Yet, as is the case with any feature, some tend to overlook it completely in favor of other native features, or overuse it. This bears the question: When to use labels?
Why use Confluence labels instead of just parent pages or Statuses?
Confluence gives you a few different ways to organize and provide greater context. parent/child page hierarchy, folders, page statuses, and of course, labels. Each has its place—but labels stand out when you need flexibility and scale. Here’s how they compare:
Page trees & hierarchies Vs labels:
Page trees are primarily designed to group and structure content rather than classify it. They’re great when you’re navigating content, not necessarily searching for it. For example, you can group meeting notes or sprint plans under holistic parent pages for easy visualization and navigation. But what if you want to group content from multiple spaces together? You simply can’t as child pages are only tied to one parent page which in turn is tied to the space. This is when you should use labels as thy allow you to associate a page with multiple categories or contexts without duplicating or re-organizing the hierarchy.
Statuses Vs labels:
I personally love content statutes. As a marketer they help me associate pages with specific statutes such as Draft, In Progress, Published, etc. They are visual and consistent, especially when integrated with workflows and custom dashboards. And the thing is they only provide the status of a page. What about other classification criteria such as the content type, project, team, topic, etc? This is when you should be using labels. They help you provide more context for a given Confluence page rather than just the status.
Getting started with Confluence labels
Labels are perhaps the most straightforward feature to implement in Confluence.
- First, access your Confluence page.
- At the bottom you can find a placeholder marked “+ Add Label”
- Click and start typing. If your label exists you can simply select it. If not, you can create a new one.
- Repeat the same process for as many labels you want to include.
Best practices to make the most out of Confluence labels
It is not necessarily about the feature, rather how to make the most out of it. Being easy to implement makes Confluence labels a double-edged sword. And we’ve seen many teams implement as many labels as they can, simply because they can. In this section, we’ll cover some basic best practices to better work with Confluence labels.
Tip #1: Use a labeling convention
Labels should be consistent across your Confluence site to ensure easy implementation and familiarity. More often than not we see teams use different formats for labels which results in duplicates and an overall bad experience. Think “team-event” and “teamEvent”. Both serve the same purpose.
Decide on a consistent format for your labels early and share it with the team. Whether it’s kebab-case (project-alpha), camelCase (projectAlpha), or snake_case (project_alpha), pick one and stick with it.
Tip #2: Document your labels
The labels to be associated with Confluence pages should be referenced and shared with the team. And the reason for this is simple. You don’t want such decisions to be made at the individual level because they can result in duplicates and challenging search experience.
Create a reference page listing common or recommended labels for your team or project. This helps others use existing labels instead of inventing new ones for the same purpose. You can even include guidelines and examples.
Tip #3: Leverage macros to embed content with labels
Embedding content is key to give teams the right info at the right place. Think of a space homepage, company hub, etc. And here you have a variety of macros that work wonders with labels. First, we have the Content by Label macro to group content from specific labels. For example, a “meeting-notes” label can power a live-updating list of all team meeting notes across the space. Another useful macro is the Labels list. This allows you to list all relevant labels from a given space and by clicking on each label, teams can access content associated with it.
Tip #4: Automate the process of labeling pages
Labeling content is easy, but if you have a lot of labels to associate with a given page, the process can quickly grow to become tedious and error prone. And for this you can leverage Confluence automation to auto-label your content.
The automation rule here is straight to the point. When a page is published by a specific user, labels are automatically associated with the page. Confluence claims it can save your teams up to 100 minutes per quarter (I think it’s more).
Tip #5: Review and prune regularly
Over time, labels can become cluttered. Periodically review your label usage, consolidate similar ones, and remove unused or redundant labels. Keeping things clean ensures the system stays useful.
When used effectively, Confluence labels can enhance your team’s ability to find, filter, and manage content. They’re low effort, high reward—and best of all, they grow with your space. So next time you create or edit a page, don’t overlook that little “Add label” link at the bottom. It might prove to be the difference between a chaotic experience and a streamlined one.
