Confluence navigation sucks: here's how to improve it

Banner image for confluence navigation sucks here's how to use it blog showing two colleagues talking to each other, one saying "I want the Content space inside the Product Marketing space and I want the Product Marketing space inside the Products space", and the other saying "Ah. Well you see, that would be sensible. Confluence isn't sensible."

Navigating Confluence can be like looking for a specific clothing store in a big city without a map. Confluence search can be like asking directions of people who don’t really know where the store is, but try their best to help anyway, inadvertently sending you down dead ends.

And once you’ve finally found the Confluence space you’re after, it’s like arriving at the store to find that all the clothes have been pulled off their hangers and strewn across the floor.

F#!$! that. This article looks at ways of improving your Confluence navigation so that your users can avoid this horror and find the space and page they need quickly.

The importance of easy Confluence navigation

The flexibility of Confluence is a double-edged sword. Being able to create spaces and pages easily is great for creativity and collaboration, but leads to sprawl and content bloat when not governed properly. It’s not uncommon for the company Confluence to become a hot mess of too many spaces, duplicate content, and badly constructed page trees.

Over time, it becomes impossible to find the content you need quickly. The irony is that Confluence is meant to be a knowledge base, a place to find information.

Improving your Confluence navigation can therefore achieve a bunch of things:

Positive user experience: users are able to find the information they need quickly and intuitively
Increased productivity: users don’t waste time searching for Confluence pages
Better collaboration: it’s easier for Confluence users to contribute to shared content
Better onboarding: easy access to resources and training materials helps newcomers get up to speed
Improved knowledge management: content owners are able to manage and update pages more efficiently and consistently.

Better navigation can even lead to a more organized Confluence, because users are more motivated to minimize clutter and maintain and arrange content logically.

Why the native Confluence navigation doesn’t help

There are a few ways of navigating Confluence spaces.

The home page will list the spaces you work in most often. The Recent dropdown in the main Confluence navigation menu will list pages you recently viewed or contributed to. Same with the Spaces dropdown. You can also go to Spaces > View all spaces for a full list of spaces that you can filter down in various ways. Within a space, you can use the Confluence sidebar to add links to other spaces or pages you feel should be readily accessible.

In 2025, Atlassian are going to be rolling out a navigation update for Confluence that includes moving recently-worked-on Confluence spaces from the Spaces dropdown to the sidebar. This will, in theory, make it easier to switch spaces; instead of going to the Spaces dropdown, spaces are visible all the time in the side menu.

Image showing the new Confluence navigation that will be rolled out in 2025, in this case showing the spaces

However, this isn’t a very effective navigation structure, and the update won’t change that. Let’s say you go to the library looking for the latest Patricia Cornwell. First you go to the fiction section. Then you find the crime section. Finally you locate the shelves with authors beginning with C. In other words, you’re following a sensible hierarchical path where you start with a broad category and gradually narrow it down to find a specific item.

Confluence spaces don’t work this way. There’s no ability to arrange or display spaces in a logical order; they simply all live in your instance independently. There are ways of finding them, but no linear path or route through them.

This is a problem if you have, say, a space for “Products” and a space for “Product Marketing”. You’d probably want the latter to be nested inside the former, so you can navigate easily between them. Similarly, you might want different spaces for each of your consulting projects, but have them live inside a consulting projects ‘parent’ space so they’re not scattered among hundreds of other spaces.

Customers have been asking for nested spaces in Confluence for, ahem, 20 years (dear god, I was still in school), which tells me that Atlassian have no intention of adding this feature any time ever.

The strange thing is, while nested spaces don’t exist in Confluence, nested pages do. Confluence page navigation employs a hierarchical, tree-like structure just like a traditional file system on a computer. This hierarchy consists of folders, parent pages, and child pages. You can create a folder for housing related work. You can then create subfolders or start building out pages. These pages can be the outermost branches of your tree, or you can extend them further, making subpages called child pages. And if you need to, subpages of your subpages.

This structure enables companies to build a sensible, linear path to the right content.

Parent pages are useful if you need to provide more context and information about child pages. If no context is needed and you simply need a container for related work, use folders.

So is Confluence page navigation easier than finding spaces?

In theory, yes. The page tree structure means that once you’re in a space, it should be nice and easy to navigate to the page that you need.

In practice, finding a page within a space is, more often than not, harder than finding a space within an instance.

Why? Because even though you can create a logical hierarchy of Confluence pages within your space doesn’t mean everyone will. Confluence navigation challenges commonly stem from a disorganized page hierarchy full of disjointed content. Many page trees have:

Misplaced pages: child pages created under the wrong parent page, breaking the logical flow
Orphaned pages: pages that are disconnected from the rest of the hierarchy, so lack context and become lost
Obsolete pages: older pages that are no longer relevant and linger in the space instead of being removed or archived.
Deep nesting: some users create many layers of subpages, requiring too many clicks to reach the content and making navigation cumbersome. This also places content too far away from its parent topic, making it difficult to see how it fits into the bigger picture. Furthermore, deeply nested pages often aren’t maintained or updated because they’re ‘out of sight, out of mind’.
Overlapping content: unclear page names and/or deep nesting can lead to users creating pages that duplicate the content or purpose of others.

Without a clear governance model or plan for creating Confluence pages, users will structure their content inconsistently, based on their own preferences. This puts people and content in silos, making collaboration hard and defeating the whole of point of the platform.

Can Confluence space categories and page labels help?

Because native Confluence space navigation isn’t great, as soon as you have a system of 10-15 spaces in your instance, it starts becoming difficult to find things. If you’re a large organization with hundreds of spaces, you end up relying heavily on Confluence search.

As I said at the start, Confluence search is like asking for directions and getting overcomplicated and sometimes unhelpful answers. The directions might lead eventually to the destination, but they take you all over the place first. In other words, Confluence search isn’t very intuitive and will return a high volume of irrelevant results, especially in large instances.

You can improve the searchability of your Confluence by encouraging people to use labels. These are basically keywords you can include on pages. This allows you to search by label and return only pages that have those labels.

You can label spaces as well as pages, in effect creating Confluence space categories. For example, if you have spaces for all your consulting projects, you can label each one “consulting-project”. While you can’t search by space category, you can go to Spaces > View all spaces in the top Confluence navigation menu, and select the category there. This filters down the list of spaces to only those with the label “consulting-project”.

3 ways of improving Confluence navigation

Relying so heavily on Confluence search to find content means that your Confluence lacks good navigation paths. So let’s look at some ways of creating or improving those paths.

Establish a governance model for creating Confluence pages and spaces

A well-defined governance model can ensure that content gets created in an organized and manageable fashion, making it easier to navigate.

So, limit the creation of new spaces by requiring approval from a designated content manager. The content manager should make sure that there isn’t already a space serving a similar purpose when a new one is proposed, thereby avoiding unnecessary space proliferation.

Use a naming convention for spaces that is consistent across teams and departments. This will make it easier to identify and locate content. And try to enforce logical page hierarchies. The parent-child relationship should be simple and intuitive, and folders and parent pages should be appropriately named, telling users exactly what kind of content can be found there.

What would really help with standardizing page hierarchies is the ability to create Confluence space templates. If spaces have broadly similar page trees, it enables users to move between spaces and know immediately where to go to find a piece of information. Unfortunately, you can’t create your own space templates out of the box, and copying a space isn’t yet possible in Cloud. (Boo, Atlassian!)

There are some built-in templates. Confluence Data Center has four space blueprints: team space, knowledge base space, documentation space, and software project space. Confluence Cloud comes with two templates: collaboration or knowledge base.

But it’s most likely that you’ll want to create your own. Fortunately, there are apps on the Atlassian Marketplace that allow you to copy spaces and make your own space templates. Using these apps can really help build a consistent structure within your instance.

Create custom Confluence menus to nest spaces and lay paths to important content

As discussed earlier, the fact that you can’t nest Confluence spaces to create a hierarchical navigation path is a huge problem. A problem that only gets worse as the number of spaces in your instance grows.

The Atlassian Marketplace app Navigation Menus for Confluence helps overcome this. Navigation Menus lets you create custom, website-style menus for different spaces, users, and languages in Confluence. Its purpose is to reduce the need through sift through countless spaces and long, deep page trees to find content.

Image showing two different styles for navigation menus for Confluence

Once you’re in a space, there’s no easy way to navigate to another, but with Navigation Menus, you can create a menu bar that’s always there, no matter what space you’re in. The menu depth of up to three levels allows you to nest spaces, in effect creating parent-child relationships between them, e.g. a “Product Marketing” space inside a “Products” space. In a sprawling Confluence, this enables users to orient themselves quickly and know where to go next.

And although companies really should organize their Confluence spaces to make sure page trees don’t get too complex, Navigation Menus helps alleviate usability frustrations when the inevitable sometimes happens. Simply create a space menu that includes the most important pages and it’ll be there no matter what page you’re on.

Navigation Menus also lets you add images, icons, and background colors to customize your menus and boost their effectiveness as a navigation tool. If there are lots of spaces in your menus, it helps users to be able to quickly scan for an image.

One Navigation Menus customer said that it was because of the improved Confluence navigation that they were inspired to create a space template that all of their teams now follow. “Without having those Navigation Menus that could send someone directly to the space they need, I don’t think they would have bothered to do that,” the customer said.

Maintain oversight and conduct regular audits

Another way of improving your Confluence organization and navigation is to establish clear ownership and roles per space, including a person to maintain it. This person should make a schedule for regularly reviewing and auditing the content to identify outdated, duplicate, or irrelevant pages.

Confluence Data Center has built-in analytics tools to tell you which Confluence pages and spaces haven’t been accessed or worked on in a while. Confluence Cloud doesn’t, but there are apps on the Marketplace that let you see Confluence usage statistics.

You should then set a policy where pages and spaces that haven’t accessed in a certain time frame get archived.

A regular review and archiving process will help reduce clutter whilst ensuring that active content is always relevant and accessible.

To summarize (TL;DR)

Confluence navigation isn’t wonderful, and the flexibility of Confluence can make things worse. A poorly organized and unnavigable Confluence actually makes collaboration difficult, which completely defeats the whole point of Confluence.
Confluence search isn’t great either, but labels improve the searchability of content. You can also label spaces and create space categories, and you can use those categories as a filter when viewing all spaces.
Confluence page navigation is way better than Confluence space navigation. Within spaces, you can create page hierarchies and guide users on a sensible, linear path through the content. You can’t do this with spaces because spaces live independently of one another, i.e. you can’t nest one space inside another.
Nested spaces in Confluence are achievable with the Atlassian Marketplace app Navigation Menus for Confluence. This app lets you create a three-level menu made up of different spaces, e.g. a “Content” space inside a “Product Marketing” space inside a “Products” space.
Establishing a policy for content creation and keeping Confluence spaces organized can really improve navigation. Make sure people are using the page tree structure properly, and where possible, use Marketplace apps to copy spaces or create spaces based on templates. This will help standardize space creation, so that users always know where they’re going when they switch spaces.
When your page trees do start to become too complex, Navigation Menus can ease usability concerns by putting the most important pages in an always-on menu.
Establishing a policy for maintaining your Confluence pages and spaces can do further wonders for navigation and usability. Periodic content auditing puts the brakes on content sprawl and helps make sure Confluence is the organized, efficient workspace and source of information it should be.

If you’re interested in seeing how Navigation Menus can improve the ability of Confluence users to find what they need quickly, book a personal demo or try Navigation Menus free for a month.