Is it okay to start at Heading 2 instead of Heading 1?

[jprateragg]

We're using the built-in styles in Confluence right now, and they work. However, there are some pages that have just a few paragraphs of content, but still needs to be separated by headings. The text for Heading 1 is too large and looks funny, but the Heading 2 is a good size. We use Heading 1 on other pages that are longer, but there are some pages where we start at Heading 2 (and only use Heading 2 to separate a few paragraphs of content). Is this okay? Is this going to cause a problem in the future? Thanks.

[Milo Test · Accepted solution]

It's totally OK to do that. There are very few macros that utilize the heading styles, and even then, they'll likely work fine if you are consistent.

[Bill Bailey]

As a tech writer, that is an absolute no-no.   When you try to PDF content from a collection of pages, having some of the pages have poor hierarchy, can screw up the final results. Also, if you later want to have in-page ToC that stops at a certain level, you will get inconsistent results.

I would opt to have custom CSS to make the headings closer to what you want and usable in all situations. BUT there are no rules to prevent you from doing what you do.

[Steffen Heller]

Well, if you have pages that belong together, the different headings should represent a certain hierarchy. If you use headings for design purposes instead, the hierarchy will get mixed up. For example, if you create a table of content the Heading 2 pages will be rendered as children of the above Heading 1 pages which is probably not what you want.