How can I organize my Confluence space? and what am I doing wrong?
We have all asked these questions when creating or navigating a space. I remember when I first joined Vectors, I was unfamiliar with Confluence. While exploring, I came across everything and nothing at the same time—meeting notes, project plans, marketing strategy pages, you name it. For new joiners, people without proper training, and little prior knowledge of Confluence, a well-organized Confluence space is key to locating important information, easy collaboration, and knowledge sharing.
So, without further ado, let’s see why your Confluence space suck, and how can you better organize it.
Why Is Your Confluence Space Messy?
1. No Proper Confluence Training
One of the main reasons your Confluence space is messy is the lack of proper training. New users often feel overwhelmed by the multitude of features and capabilities Confluence offers. Without guidance, they may create content haphazardly, leading to disorganization. As your Confluence space grows, managing and structuring content becomes challenging. Large volumes of content without a systematic organization strategy can turn your space into a chaotic mess, making it difficult for users to find what they need.
2. Unlabeled Content and Missing Information
If your Confluence pages aren’t labeled or if they lack important information such as the page’s metadata, finding relevant content might become a nightmare. Unsearchable content means frustration and a drop in your team’s productivity. Imagine you missed a meeting and need to catch up on the team’s discussion, plans, and progress. Finding those meeting notes is crucial, but if you have to waste time digging through the Confluence space, you’re just burning time and energy. This not only slows you down but also impacts your entire team’s efficiency.
3. Messy Page Hierarchy
A disorganized page hierarchy is another common issue. When different types of content—such as pages, blogs, whiteboards, and smart links—are scattered without a logical structure, navigating through Confluence takes up more effort and time than necessary. This can lead to confusion and wasted time as users struggle to locate the information they need.
Tips to Organize your Confluence Space
#1. Assess Your Space Content
The key to better organize your Confluence space is knowing and classifying your content. The Content Manager feature, available for Premium and Enterprise Confluence Cloud plans, is perfect for this. Using the Content Manager, you can easily filter and search through your content, making it easier to efficiently manage content within your space. Administrators can assess content with the table view before taking actions to archive outdated content, change pages’ ownership, or delete unnecessary content from the Confluence space.
While this feature primarily handles pages and whiteboards content, it’s a good starting point. 👉 Learn more about the Content Manager feature by Atlassian.
For other content types, or other Confluence cloud plans, users have to clean up their space manually by going through each content piece separately. Using page labels, Confluence native page status, and other native macros can facilitate this process.
#2. Structure Content Based on Your Needs for Easy Navigation
Even if your content is well-established, a densely populated Confluence space can be daunting, especially for new joiners. They require all the information they can get to understand the job, current projects, team organization, tasks, goals, and objectives.
Confluence’s shortcuts feature allows you to mark important content for easy access from the left-side navigation bar. With a logical page hierarchy, navigating and understanding different content within the space becomes simpler. For example, in a marketing team space, you should categorize content such as team members’ tasks, goals, objectives, meeting notes, content strategy, etc., making it easier for users—both new and current team members—to understand the structure and find the information they need.
#3. Set Up Permissions to Ensure Accountability
A disorganized Confluence site can make it difficult to hold team members accountable for content. While Confluence marks document owners and editing details, it’s crucial to establish clear permissions. Control who can view, edit, or delete content to maintain the integrity of the Confluence space. For example, limit editing permissions to your marketing calendar to the marketing team manager. Navigate to Space Settings > Space Permissions > Users, and then customize permissions.
#4. Utilize Confluence Space and Page Templates
Make use of Confluence’s built-in templates or create your own to standardize content creation. Templates help maintain consistency across pages and ensure that important information is always included. This makes it easier for users to navigate and understand the content.
#5. Use Native Confluence Reports to Manage Content
Lleverage other advanced Confluence macros at your disposal such as the Page Properties and Page Properties Report macros to summarize important information on your Confluence pages. You can include the Page Properties macro at the top of meeting notes to keep track of important information. This way, team members can easily track meeting notes content using the Page Properties Report for centralized knowledge sharing and easy access to relevant information.
👉 Learn more about native Confluence report macros.
You can use the native Page Status macro to mark workflow statuses and list content by status for easy navigation. This helps users understand the current state of content at a glance, making it easier to locate information.
#6. Label Your Content
Properly label your content and make use of Confluence’s native page macros to organize information. Labels improve searchability and allow users to filter content based on specific criteria. You can enhance the look and feel of your Confluence pages with these macros to create a more user-friendly experience.
Users looking for information within the space related to “marketing” can add one or multiple labels to the page to filter results using the Confluence search bar. This makes the search experience more effective and straightforward. Users can specify the space and label to filter results in the Confluence advanced search feature to easily locate the information they need.
Better Organize your Confluence Space with Content Formatting Toolkit for Confluence
While Confluence does a great job of helping you manage content effectively, you can take it to the next level with third-party add-ons on Atlassian Marketplace specifically for content and document management.
Our Content Formatting toolkit (available on Cloud and Data Center), offers a variety of macros and customization options to improve the visual appeal and functionality of your Confluence pages, making them more engaging and easier to navigate. You can include macros like Tabs, Expanders to facilitate page navigation, as well as macros to make your content more engaging and collaborative, such as customizable buttons and progress bars. Additionally, it offers macros to highlight important information, such as customizable panels, tooltips, and footnotes.
To learn more about Content Formatting Toolkit for Confluence Cloud, you can visit the documentation, take a look at the YouTube tutorials, or try the app yourself for free.
A well-organized Confluence space is not only essential for efficient collaboration and knowledge sharing but also makes life easier and more enjoyable to use. By implementing these tips and leveraging Confluence’s features, you can easily transform your chaotic space into a structured and user-friendly environment. With proper training, a logical content structure, and the right tools, your team can fully harness the power of Confluence to enhance productivity and collaboration.
