If you’re looking for a powerful tool to centralize and share your product guides, FAQs, and knowledge resources, look no further than Confluence for all your documentation needs. Its robust feature set and extensibility make it a top choice for teams aiming to create engaging, user-friendly content.
In this article, we’ll walk you through six essential steps to effectively use Confluence for documentation.
Key insights on how to use Confluence for documentation
- Use the Confluence documentation space template to launch your site.
- Focus on user guides, onboarding, troubleshooting, FAQs, and support.
- Structure your space logically with clear hierarchies, links, and labels.
- Use templates and macros for consistent, scalable content.
- Enable anonymous access to share your documentation publicly.
- Combine apps like Spacecraft, Aura, and Karma to brand and enhance your documentation space.
Step 1: Create a space in Confluence for documentation
To get started with Confluence for documentation, select Spaces → View all spaces → Create space.
Choose Documentation space. This template includes a tailored overview with a search box for users to search only your documentation. It also features macros like Recently Updated, Featured Pages, and Popular Labels.
Name your space and click Create.
Confluence tip: Build out your documentation space before making it public. Once anonymous access is granted, you’ll need to restrict visibility for drafts manually. Prepare your primary pages first before enabling public access (explained in Step 5).
Step 2: Define your content structure in Confluence for documentation
Your core focus when using Confluence for documentation should be a clear, structured user guide. Create pages that describe every function of your app in a step-by-step manner.
Consider including the following in your user guide:
- A “Getting Started” section with installation and licensing info
- Use cases that make your product’s functionality tangible – Clearing up an app’s features and showing new ways to get even more value from it
- A product roadmap – Show users what you’re working on what features they can look forward to
- Troubleshooting and FAQ pages
- Settings, admin options, and support/contact info
Plan your page hierarchy carefully. Create distinct sections for new users, feature walkthroughs, and customer stories. For example, keep FAQs separate from how-to guides for better accessibility.
Confluence tip: Use links and labels to improve discoverability. Add internal links to related pages and use the filter by label macro to surface topic-specific collections. Read Atlassian’s guide on using labels for more tips.
Step 3: Ensure scalability and consistency in your documentation
One of the best reasons to use Confluence for documentation is how easy it is to keep things consistent and scalable.
Use Confluence’s page templates to ensure a uniform structure. Built-in templates like “How-To Article” or “Product Roadmap” are helpful, or create your own custom templates.
Another way of making pages quicker and easier to create and update is by reusing content. If, for example, you’re going to use the same word, sentence, paragraph, image, product version number etc. on multiple pages, just create it once and reuse it on other pages.
You can also reuse content efficiently:
- Use the Excerpt macro to define reusable sections
- Use Excerpt Include and Include Page macros to insert them elsewhere
This approach ensures that changes made in one place reflect across all documentation.
Confluence tip: If you don’t have admin rights, create template-like pages labeled “template” with placeholder content and macros that your team can copy.
Step 4: Write clear, digestible content
This is probably the most important step in this guide: For your Confluence for documentation setup to succeed, your content must be clear, concise, and structured for easy reading. If your information isn’t concise, your users won’t read it at all. Vague or wordy documentation leads to support tickets and confused users. Decide exactly what your users need to know, and what they don’t.
Of course, it’s not just about what you present, but how you present it. Use formatting tools and macros to break content into readable chunks:
- Dividers, tables, and expandable sections
- Tip, Info, Warning, Note, Error, and custom panels
- Table of contents macros
Confluence tip: Enhance visual appeal and structure with Aura macros. Try Aura out now, and add buttons, cards, custom panels, and other visual elements to make your content more engaging.
Step 5: Publish and share your documentation
Once you’ve created your content, make it public by enabling anonymous access. This allows anyone on the internet to view your documentation.
- Your site admin must allow anonymous access at the site level first.
- Then, the space admin enables anonymous access at the space level:
- Go to Space Settings → Space Permissions → Anonymous access
- Check the View box and click Save
Remember, once you’ve made your documentation public, customers will see everything, including any internal comments made while the pages were being drafted. So make sure you delete those before granting anonymous access.
Confluence tip: Don’t confuse anonymous access with public links. Anonymous access is intended for full-space visibility; public links are for sharing individual pages. Find out more about the differences between Confluence’s anonymous access and public links.
» Want to keep comments? Use Spacecraft and hide Confluence-native UI elements from public view with ease.
Step 6: Brand your documentation site
Confluence is powerful, but it still looks like Confluence. Using Confluence for documentation often means needing to brand and polish the space for a customer-facing experience.
One drawback of using Confluence for technical documentation is that Confluence is primarily a document management platform for internal use. Although customer-facing documentation has become one of its main use cases, it’s never been Atlassian’s primary concern.
Here’s what a non-public space looks like versus a public space. See if you can spot the difference!
Making a Confluence space public hides only a few elements—like the edit and Share buttons—while everything else stays visible: space settings, the Create button, contributors (even deactivated accounts), last-modified dates, comments, and page history. This exposes internal details that should remain private.
Confluence also lacks customization options for public content, so your documentation ends up looking like a standard Atlassian site—not a reflection of your brand. That’s because anonymous access isn’t a key focus for Atlassian.
Spacecraft solves this by turning your Confluence content into a branded, professional website. It lets you hide native elements, protect sensitive info, and deliver a cleaner, more user-friendly experience for your customers. Here’s how it can turn out:
Confluence tip: Spacecraft integrates with Unsplash, letting you add beautiful, high-resolution background images to enhance your site’s visual appeal.
Bottom Line: Go from Wiki to Wow
Confluence for documentation empowers teams to create, scale, and share product knowledge with clarity and efficiency. By leveraging its built-in tools and extending them with powerful apps, you can transform a standard wiki into a branded, user-friendly documentation hub. Whether you’re building an internal knowledge base or a public help center, the six steps outlined above provide a proven path to success.
Get started today and turn your documentation into a dynamic asset that supports your product and delights your users. If you’re ready to deliver branded, public-facing content that enhances the customer experience, book a personal demo of Spacecraft or try it free for a month.