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Adding Buttons in Confluence: Tips and Evaluating Workarounds

Adding Buttons in Confluence: Tips and How to Get Started

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Here’s the scenario: You’re working on a Confluence page and you want to link to specific internal or external resources. But what are your options? The first things that come to mind are: Links, macros and buttons. The latter will be the topic of today’s blog post where we’ll answer the following questions: Why do you need buttons in Confluence? Are they available by default? and how to create and make the most out of them?

Why are buttons important in Confluence?

Facilitate access to information

Inserting buttons within your Confluence pages help your users access information quickly and with minimal effort. They provide a clear and distinct way to direct users to access important resources or take specific actions. Instead of plain text links, a button stands out and draws attention, making it easier for users to find what they need.

Enhance your space experience

Having the ability to add buttons helps enhance your overall Confluence experience. More often than not, buttons can link to internal resources within your space. One might argue that those resources exist within the page tree, or can be easily found within macro lists. But that implies looking around the space or page to find resources, right? Buttons, on the other hand, eliminate that extra effort by making key resources immediately accessible—and sometimes even highlighting resources the user didn’t realize they needed.

Drive action

Buttons are specifically designed to get your attention and prompt you into taking action. And that’s regardless of the action, be it accessing an internal page, visiting a website, filling a form, and more. With the right customization coupled with good placement, you can guide users seamlessly to the most important actions, ensuring they engage with the content or resources you want to highlight. 

Is there a native buttons macro in Confluence?

Confluence Cloud doesn’t offer a native button macro out of the box. And there are no signs of the macro being introduced any time soon. With this being said though, workarounds do exist, and their potential of replacing buttons depend on what you’re looking for, and they vary from “promising” to “not worth your time”. Here’s a look at some potential workarounds:

Images with hyperlinks 

I used to do this in school and that’s saying something. Here you’ll basically add images that might resemble a button. Then you include a hyperlink to the desired destination. While it can mimic the look of a button, a static image isn’t interactive or accessible enough. And then there is the problem of striking the image right size, grouping them together to create a button group. 

Verdict: For occasional use, but definitely not worth the time.

Simple text links

Another option is to use simple text links. Although easy to implement and maintain, they completely miss the mark for one simple reason. They don’t stand out visually. Sure you can make them bold, italic, underlined, or use advanced customization such as inline or card. But still, they fail in comparison to what actual buttons offer in terms of design and customization. 

Verdict: A bit more promising but still not interactive enough.

List macros

Confluence comes with a host of list macros to embed content within your pages. Think labels list, latest updated content, and so on. These lists can’t replace a single button, what they can replace is button groups. 

You’ve got advanced filtering options to display specific content based on various criteria. Similar to simple links, they lack the visual and dynamic touch. But that’s not all, since these macros retrieve information from Confluence, you can’t embed external links within them.

Verdict: Useful for certain scenarios, but still falls short.

Cards

When this feature was announced a while back I was excited. Finally Confluence offered a native way to include cards. Cards are visually appealing and can help you highlight resources across your site. They’re also customizable as you can add a title, description, and of course, links and images.

However, while cards are a step in the right direction, they’re not quite the same as buttons. They take up more space, aren’t as action-oriented, and are better suited to showcase content rather than initiating action. That said, they can work well if you’re looking for a visually engaging way to display multiple links or resources in a grid-like layout.

Verdict: Promising yet still not buttons.

While these workarounds can help, they don’t quite replicate the full button experience. Functionality wise, they might do the job, but they lack the advanced customization features a dedicated macro will provide. 

How to add buttons to your Confluence page

Using the button macro from Content Formatting Toolkit for Confluence Cloud is both simple and intuitive:

  • Navigate to your Confluence page and hit “Edit”
  • Specify where you want to insert your button, and type /Button | Vectors
  • Within the dialog box you’ll have two tabs: Custom and content. First customize your button by specifying the shape, size, icon placement, and colors.
customize confluence button
  • Then add your text and link.
add text and link to confluence button
  • Once you finish, hit save.
Confluence button group

Best practices to create and manage buttons in Confluence

Keep things simple

As is the case with any macro in Confluence, the key is to keep things simple. Avoid overusing buttons and cluttering your page experience. Instead, try using them only for primary and secondary actions. What’s the difference? Think of primary actions as the important ones, like “Visit Support Portal” or “Leave Feedback”. Secondary actions are less critical, like “Learn More” or “View Details.” By keeping things simple, you’ll create a simpler yet more engaging page experience.

Customize & differentiate your buttons

By simply looking at a button, your users should be able to tell the desired action. This is when customization options come into play. You can edit the button’s shape and size, add icons, and specify colors. Of course, you can edit the text and add your links (internal or external). 

For example, use bold, eye-catching colors for primary actions and more neutral tones for secondary ones. 

Placement is key

Regardless of how engaging and beautifully designed your buttons are, their placement is key to driving action. The placement depends of course, on the desired action, user habits, and content length. Simply put, aim for the top of the page and important sections, all while avoiding burying your buttons at the bottom.

You always want to place your primary buttons at the top of the page, or at least the first sections, where they can easily be spotted. Secondary buttons should be well placed within their relevant sections.

Buttons help you facilitate access to information, drive action, and boost engagement. While Confluence doesn’t offer a button macro, you can rely on our very own button macro from Content Formatting Toolkit. If you liked what you saw, then make sure to give the app a try. And for more tips and tricks, you can check out the blog and our dedicated YouTube channel.