Confluence spaces with too many pages
This insight checks whether any of your spaces exceed the recommended number of pages.
Confluence spaces that have too many pages will have their overall performance affected, including navigating around the page tree, viewing the space, and viewing and editing pages in the space. Experience for users is degraded, but that will also depend on the number of pages and their content.
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 that you first start with basic cleanup, such as:
Purge deleted items from the trash
Identify unused pages and delete them
If that doesn't bring you below the limit, try other actions from the Confluence cleanup guide:
Use Marketplace apps that help with cleanup and archiving
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
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
Page count for each space
Purge deleted pages
When people delete pages, they're not deleted permanently, but instead land in a trash of a specific space. Check the trash for each affected space to find easy candidates for deletion.
To purge deleted pages:
Open any of the affected spaces listed above.
Go to Space settings > Content tools > Trash.
Review the list of pages. Select Purge all to permanently delete all of them.
Set retention rules to purge deleted pages in the future
You can set retention rules that will purge your pages after they've been deleted for a specific number of days. You can use them to avoid having to check the trash in the future, or to purge deleted pages across your Confluence instance.
To set retention rules:
In Confluence, go to Administration > General configuration.
Go to Retention rules.
Set your preferred retention rules.
Follow best practices for space maintenance
Spaces with too many pages 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.
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