Why Continuous Improvements in Confluence Matter

[#1]

Continuous Improvement(s)

When using Confluence regularly as a team, you add new pages, archive old ones, create new spaces, and edit pages daily. It’s almost like your Confluence site becomes a living, breathing entity that needs time, love and care to function.

Let It Grow, Let It Grow

At K15t, we use Confluence for everything, every day, in every team—it’s our single source of truth. This has many advantages since no matter what information you’re looking for, it’s somewhere in Confluence.

Confluence thrives on adding content to it, like adding water to a tree (Fun fact though! Did you know that trees actually get most of their mass from the atmosphere?). By adding pages, spaces, attachments, or comments to your Confluence site, it grows. Growing your site is awesome! This means your team is working together in a collaborative way.

Fertilize It Continuously

Like fertilizing a tree to keep it healthy, you also have to nurture your Confluence site. Just as it’s not enough to plant a tree and call it a day, your Confluence site structure isn’t perfect after its initial setup.

Here are some common problems and tips to resolve them:

• Space structures don’t work anymore: If your spaces grow over time, your initial structure might reach its limits and stop working effectively. At K15t, we experience this all the time. Take the time to evaluate if your structure is still effective and think about how it can be improved. This is also a great chance to explore new features like Confluence Automations, Databases, or Whiteboards.

• Finding the right page becomes difficult: As more pages and content are added to your Confluence site, finding specific content becomes more challenging. In our last issue, we talked about how to improve search results in Confluence.

• Confluence is used differently than when you started: Sometimes you start using Confluence for one specific use case like planning events but over time use it for different purposes, like writing your product documentation. Adapt your Confluence site to these new use cases by making use of new features like Confluence Databases or Confluence Whiteboards, creating new page templates for these use cases, and even exploring the Atlassian Marketplace for apps that can level up the way you work and collaborate.

Improving your Confluence site is essential to working effectively and avoiding frustration in the long run. At K15t for example, we recently changed our approach to using the page properties report macro and switched to using Confluence Databases. Now we have a better overview of our content and less frustration during bulk updates.

Remove Old Leaves

Just as a tree sheds its old leaves, you should also let go of old pages and spaces in your Confluence site. Old pages tend to stick around because they are either forgotten or it’s unclear if the information is still needed. But keeping these pages means they may show up in search results and clutter your Confluence site, blocking the view of the important pages.

Luckily, in Confluence Cloud, we have page owners who can be contacted to see if the page can be archived or deleted. Another great help is to look at the analytics in Confluence once a year or so to see which pages haven’t been viewed for a while, or run an automation that informs page owners about their inactive pages.

Structuring Confluence content from the beginning can give you a successful start for your site or space.

Cheers,
Steffen

If you enjoyed this article, you'll love our newsletter, Weekly Dose of Confluence. Every Friday, we bring you articles like these, latest news, tips, and tricks to help you get the most out of Confluence—all for free. Don't miss out—subscribe now!

[Dave Mathijs]

I couldn't agree more. As an Atlassian consultant, I see so many client sites where no gardening has been performed for months or even years. In other words, there simply is no governance in place to keep it neat and tidy. This is so important to provide it growing out of hand as it will take significantly more time to clean up afterwards.

[Umer Sohail _K15t_]

Great stuff @Steffen Burzlaff _K15t_  👏