Cleaning up Confluence
Asked by Yatish Madhav:

Hi

What is the most ideal and cleanest way to verify and clean up Confluence?

We have many spaces (personal and other) and would like to verify which can be cleaned and removed but want to make sure it is safe to do so first.

Is there also a best practice to maintain Confluence pages and spaces? Asking this as we do not want to freely give out Confluence admin rights to many users

Thank you

Yatish


Answers:
author: Dan Breyen
body: Without knowing content, it's going to be hard to give out exact recommendations. In the past we've taken the 'Divide and Conquer' route, as well as the "Focus on an Area" approach.

I found some automation of things that can be done and I've also found these articles that may help:

[Clean Up Guide](https://confluence.atlassian.com/clean/cleanup-guide-1018788576.html)

[Clean Up Confluence](https://confluence.atlassian.com/clean/clean-up-your-confluence-instance-1026047969.html)

[Adaptavist Confluence Cleanup](https://www.adaptavist.com/blog/how-to-clean-up-confluence-in-six-steps)

If you're limiting access, then it might be worth looking at the "Focus on an Area" and pick a space, put out some guidelines, and then start there. Once that one's done, then move on to the next one.

At previous companies, we've had to go through every Knowledge Base article every year to see if it was still relevant or needed some updating.

Hope that helps.

comments: author: Yatish Madhav
body: Brilliant - thansk [@Dan Breyen](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5086375) - I am sure this will help. What doesnt help is that we had many admins and have many spaces and pages.

It is a tough one to keep documentation up to date - esp in a large org with many contributors.

Thanks again though


author: Rilwan Ahmed
body: Hi [@Dan Breyen](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5086375)   
The links point to Data center confluence. [@Yatish Madhav](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/3279728) is using Confluence cloud


author: Levente Szabo _Midori_
body: [@Yatish Madhav](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/3279728) [@Dan Breyen](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5086375)

As far as best practices and automation go, [this is a comprehensive guide to Confluence content lifecycle management](https://www.midori-global.com/blog/2023/01/18/confluence-content-lifecycle-management?utm_campaign=gh&utm_medium=cac-comment-2501143&utm_source=cac). It also includes a [strategy document](https://www.midori-global.com/downloads/confluence-content-lifecycle-strategy-sentry.pdf) (with rules for what is expired, not viewed, etc) from the team at Sentry. You can use that as a template for starting out with your own CLM strategy.

I hope it adds value to your process of keeping Confluence clean and clutter-free!


author: Aron Gombas _Midori_
body: I believe that:

1. Cleaning up Confluence after the quality of the content degraded should not be a one-time thing, but something that you do *continuously*. It is easier/safer/more efficient to maintain the quality, then do big clean-ups time to time with eventual side-effects.
2. The clean-up task should not be delegated to one or a handful of dedicated users, because they may not have all the knowledge to make the correct decision (keep without changes? keep but update? archive? delete?) about each individual page. Each page or family of pages should have their owners who are responsible for them.

These are, among others, the concepts that can be implemented with the [Better Content Archiving](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/123/better-content-archiving-for-confluence?tab=overview&hosting=cloud) app. It supports [page status tracking](https://www.midori-global.com/products/better-content-archiving-for-confluence/cloud/documentation/track-the-content-status), [page owners](https://www.midori-global.com/products/better-content-archiving-for-confluence/cloud/documentation/manage-the-content-lifecycle/quick-actions#set-owner), [custom notifications](https://www.midori-global.com/products/better-content-archiving-for-confluence/cloud/documentation/configure/notification-schemes), periodic reviews, [auto-archiving](https://www.midori-global.com/products/better-content-archiving-for-confluence/cloud/documentation/configure/automation-schemes), etc. to automate the process.

You can try this free if it works in your use case (it will).

*(Discl. this paid and supported app is developed by our team. Free for 10 users.)*


author: marc -Collabello--Phase Locked-
body: We make a free addon which allows you to list pages which have not been updated since some time. It's an easy way to focus on pages which are likely outdated. You can get it through the marketplace: [Keep it up to date!](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1226276/keep-it-up-to-date)

Obviously, once you have the list of not updated pages, you need to verify yourself if they are outdated.


author: Rilwan Ahmed
body: Hi [@Yatish Madhav](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/3279728) ,

If you are in [Confluence Cloud Premium and Enterprise](https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/learn-about-confluence-cloud-plans/) plan, then you can make use of Analytics.

<https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/view-analytics-to-see-how-content-is-performing/>

For standard plans, you get page analytics. You need to go to each page and check  
<https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/view-insights-on-pages/>

For future, I would suggest

* Restrict users from creating personal spaces
* Grant create space permissions to only a group of users. May be you can setup a process so that users raise request to create new space, check why its needed or something related to it exists and then approve for it.


Tags: cloud

confluence-cloud