Changing the Sequential Order of Pages

Confluence allows you to present your pages in any order (sequence) you choose. The position of a page is reflected in the following places:

The navigation area of the space sidebar. (See Finding Content.)
The pages Tree on the 'Pages' view in the space.
Pages exported to PDF, HTML and XML.
The Page Tree macro.
The Children macro.

Alphabetical versus manual order

By default, Confluence will present your pages in alphabetical order. When you move a page to a different position, the order becomes manual for the affected page family. When we say 'page family' we mean the immediate children of the parent page, not including the grand-children.

When ordering pages alphabetically, Confluence applies a more sophisticated 'natural' order rather than a straight alphabetical order. The natural order handles numeric values correctly when doing string comparisons.

Now let's consider what happens when you add a page to a page family, by creating a new page or by moving or copying a page into the family:

If the page family's order is alphabetical, the new page will appear in alphabetical order too.
If the page family's order is manual, the new page will appear at the bottom of the list of pages in the family.

On this page:

Related pages:

Changing the page order manually

To change the order of pages in the space:

Go to the space and choose Space tools > Reorder pages on the sidebar.
If your space is using the Documentation theme choose Browse > Pages.
Expand the branches of the tree to find the page family you wish to sort.
Drag each page to a new position in the tree.

When you drag a page to a new position, the order of the page family changes to Manual. Newly added pages will not be sorted alphabetically, but will appear at the bottom of the list.

Changing the page order to alphabetical

If the pages in a page family have been ordered manually, you can change the page order back to alphabetical.

To set the page order to alphabetical:

Go to the space and choose Space tools > Reorder pages on the sidebar.
If your space is using the Documentation theme choose Browse > Pages.
Expand branches of the tree to find the page family you wish to sort.
Choose the Sort Alphabetically (A-Z) icon beside the parent page.

The Sort Alphabetically (A-Z) icon only appears next to the parent page if the page family is currently sorted manually.

If you change your mind, you can use the Undo Sorting icon to revert back to the previous manual page order for that page family. This option is only available immediately after sorting the page (while you are still on the 'Reorder Pages' tab and have not performed any other action).

Screenshot: Page tree showing the Sort Alphabetically and Undo Sorting icons.

Sort Alphabetically only sorts the immediate children of the parent page. The grandchildren will not be re-ordered, sorting happens for one node at a time. If you want to re-order grandchildren, you need to click the Sort Alphabetically icon next to the parent of those pages.