Confluence spaces with too many nesting levels

This insight checks whether any of your spaces exceed the recommended number of nesting levels. 

Confluence spaces that have too many nesting levels (depth of page tree) will have their overall performance affected, including navigating around the page tree, viewing the space, and viewing and editing pages in the space. 

What are nesting levels?

By nesting levels, we mean the depth of your Confluence page tree. When you create a child page of a parent page, you create a new level.

What's the recommendation?

This requires an overall cleanup of your space and will probably be a team effort since our guardrail is set quite high. We recommend checking the Confluence cleanup guide to apply best practices – what exactly you choose depends on how important your space is and whether you can, for example, divide it into smaller spaces.

For this case, most probable actions include:

• Start moving away from this space by creating new spaces for teams or new projects

• Archive the space, or back it up as XML and delete it

• Reorganize the page tree to reduce the depth

• Divide the space, for example by main parent pages, and move it to smaller spaces

Review affected spaces

When viewing this recommendation from the dashboard, copy the SQL query and run it on your database.

The query returns:

• Names of affected spaces

• Nesting levels for each space

Follow best practices for space maintenance

Spaces with too many nesting levels often is a problem that can't be fixed easily or just be a one-time effort. If you have a high number of such spaces, it might mean you need change your approach to creating and managing content, for example by:

• Assigning owners: Assign Confluence gardeners and owners who will do periodical cleanup and maintenance of specific areas of Confluence.

• Themed spaces: Divide your spaces into smaller ones used by specific teams or projects. 

• New spaces for new projects: Start moving away from large spaces and create new, smaller spaces whenever a new project comes in.

• Regular cleanup: Do periodical cleanup of inactive or stale content, with the help of Confluence analytics or Marketplace apps.

Confluence cleanup guide

For best practices and ideas on how to do an overall cleanup, see Confluence cleanup guide.

Confluence cleanup area

You can also find quick links to retention rules, analytics, or space archiving in Confluence by going to Administration > General configuration > Clean up.