4 Tips to Help you Clean Up Your Confluence Instance

Confluence is a powerful collaboration tool that can bring teams together to work on projects, share information, and foster transparency within an organization.

However, like any wiki, it can quickly become cluttered and confusing if not properly maintained. Outdated pages with unreliable content, unnecessary overwhelming information, and confusing navigation can all contribute to a messy and ineffective Confluence instance.

In this article, we'll give four tips to help you keep your Confluence instance clutter-free:

1. Assess
2. Archive
3. Standardize
4. Team up

Tip 1: Assess what’s there

The first step in cleaning up your Confluence instance is to assess what's there.

During her talk at the last Toronto Atlassian Community Event, Carolyn French, PMP , Customer Success Director at Tempo Software , advised to take an inventory of all your spaces and pages, and identify what's outdated, redundant, or no longer useful.

For each space or page, you can use these 3 questions:

• Is it up-to-date?
• Is it relevant?
• Is it searchable?

You can also use Confluence's built-in analytics to see which pages are most frequently accessed and which ones are not. This will help you prioritize which pages need to be cleaned up first.

Tip 2: Archive, archive, archive

Once you've identified which pages are no longer useful, it's time to archive them.

Archiving pages allows you to remove them from the main navigation and search results, but still keep them accessible for reference purposes. This will help reduce clutter and make it easier for users to find what they need.

For users on the Confluence Cloud Premium plan, Confluence's archiving feature also includes Bulk Archiving to archive several pages at once and speed up Confluence decluttering.

You can also use Automation for Confluence Cloud to automatically archive pages that haven't been updated in a certain amount of time.

Tip 3: Standardize

To make your Confluence instance more organized and user-friendly, it's important to standardize best practices for page and content creation.

🏷️ Define a standardized label system

Defining a standardized label system will help users find the content they need more quickly and easily. Labels can be used to categorize pages and attachments, making them easier to search for and navigate.

📖 Use templates and blueprints

Using templates and blueprints will ensure that new pages are created consistently and with the same structure. This will make it easier for users to find the information they need and will help reduce confusion and clutter. Atlassian offers a wide library of templates you can browse here: Confluence Templates | Atlassian

🤩 Build beautiful and easy-to-read pages

Building beautiful pages that are easy to read and navigate will encourage users to engage with your Confluence instance. This can include using formatting tools like headings, bullet points, and images to make pages more visually appealing, as well as native Confluence macros like ‘table of content’, ‘status’ or ‘include’.

Tip 4: Team up

Confluence cleaning doesn’t have to be a one-man job. Encourage your Confluence power users to adopt the process of “Wiki Gardening” and become “Confluence gardeners”. (Thanks for the Wiki Martin Seibert from Seibert Group GmbH )

A gardener is usually responsible for a specific space or topic, and their mission involves regularly reviewing and updating pages, removing outdated or inaccurate content, and ensuring that new content is added in a consistent and organized way.

By creating a team of Confluence power users to act as gardeners, you can ensure that your Confluence instance remains organized and useful over time.

Cleaning up your Confluence instance may seem like a daunting task, but by following these four tips, you can make it a manageable and rewarding process. Assessing what's there, archiving, standardizing, and creating a team of Confluence gardeners are all important steps in ensuring that your Confluence instance remains an effective collaboration tool for your team.

Elemental, my dear Watson 🕵