Best practices for a great page tree experience

[#1]

Hi everyone,

I'm Giuliano, a product lead for Confluence Cloud!

While working with customers, we saw some opportunities that we couldn't miss in order to improve your experience with performance for larger spaces.

In this article, you can get the benefits from 5 practices shared by our product managers:

1) ~50,000 pages per space for best page tree speed and performance

For the fastest loading of the page tree, expanding and collapsing page tree items, and moving pages, we recommend keeping spaces to ~50,000 pages while we still work on improvements.

When we have spaces larger than ~50,000 pages, you may notice slower speeds of functionality like loading and navigating through the Page Tree, plus, moving pages.

2) Use the Analytics feature to identify pages team members don't use

Analytics lets you see what pages are viewed and by whom:

You can also see which pages that your team members no longer view:

• You can select the Date range for analytics

• You can click the User viewed and Views column to sort by ascending or descending views.

3) Use Automated features (Bulk Archive and Automation) to archive old, unused pages

Bulk Archive lets you select multiple pages to archive. Once you have identified old, unused pages with Analytics. Bulk Archive them to keep your space up to date:

Besides that, Confluence Automation has useful rules that suppress the need to manually perform such tasks:

• Notify people about outdated content when scheduled
• Archive outdated pages

4) Identify Confluence “Gardeners” who are responsible for the space or section of a space up to date

Confluence Gardeners are team members who periodically review the page tree or parts of the page tree to make sure it is organized and up to date.

We recommended identifying a Gardener who spends 10 minutes every month or 3 months to look at the pages in their sections to determine if any pages need to be archived, deleted, or moved to another place.

5) Create new spaces for teams or at the start of projects that require cross-team collaboration

We recommend creating a new Team space for each team to organize documentation, meeting notes, and projects.

“Team” means different things for different companies, but think of them as a group of people working toward the same goal. Having spaces focused on a Team helps make sure that all the pages in that space are relevant to everyone in that space and reduces clutter.

Teams can organize their plans, projects, meeting notes, and processes easily. It also makes things easier to maintain. Here’s an example page tree hierarchy of a team (~20 people) within Confluence:

Also, if there’s a big project that requires collaboration between multiple teams, consider creating a new space for that work. It allows that space to be focused on just the project and everything to be in one place.

Further improvements

Aside from these best practices, here are some of the plans for the future to improve technical performance:

1. Optimize storage model for >50K page trees.

2. Auditing and removing expensive queries for large page trees that slow down performance.

3. Optimizing how page tree uses persistent storage.

4. More aggressive performance targets.

5. Optimize the move page logic to make fewer requests.

[Andy Gladstone]

@Giuliano C_ thanks for the publish and update on improvements and advice for the navigation bar. I have not heard the Confluence Gardeners term before. We call them Confluence Ambassadors at our company. 

[Dave Mathijs]

More than 50,000 pages in a single space definitely needs a Confluence Gardener.

Thumbs up for sharing these best practices @Giuliano C_ 

[Matt Reiner _K15t_]

Yeah, "spaces larger than ~50,000 pages" is blowing my mind right now. Honestly, I'm surprised that the team feels confident the Confluence UI will work well with that many pages.

[Levente Szabo _Midori_]

These are great tips, thanks, @Giuliano C_! 

We at Midori have been advocating for the "gardener" concept for a long time, but times are changing and our customers nowadays tell us that shared responsibility and customizable notifications to the right content owners on a flexible schedule are just as important.

So while a single person responsible for a subset of pages is still relevant, Confluence teams also want to spread the responsibility to all contributors to maintain a healthy Confluence. It's not just the gardener anymore, who needs a nice page list in email (not 1 email per page) that need attention.

I also think teams with more than 50,000 pages need a well-thought-out Confluence content lifecycle management strategy instead of scattered features. Definitely more than identifying pages that "people don't use" or "outdated" pages. For an organization this large, these are vague metrics and also misleading: there are very important pages people don't "use", but the organization is legally obligated to keep a record of, maintain, and what's more, archive after a certain period of time (think GDPR). Enterprise teams need workflows and many page statuses to map the document management workflow to Confluence that they already have in place.

We shared in a blog what Midori thinks about how Confluence content lifecycle management could work for a large organization and shared an example strategy created by the team at Sentry.

I want to join you in urging teams using a large Confluence to take the great recommendations mentioned in the above article to improve UX, but also to take it to the next level with an enterprise-grade content lifecycle management strategy!

[Aron Gombas]

@Matt Reiner _K15t_ Not on Cloud, but on DC we talked to companies with 1M+ pages per site, and 100K+ pages per space while building our Better Content Archiving app. They haven't disclosed what their actual content was, but their numbers were real!

(These were well-known enterprise companies and I'd think most of that was machine generated content like build logs from their CI/CD system, e.g.)