How do I delete multiple pages

[David Meacock]

Simple task that seems to be difficult - how do I delete multiple pages in Confluence?

There are a bunch of 'junk' pages that I no longer need in our wiki, but it seems from the page tree view that I can only delete one at a time. Is this really the case?

[SarahA · Accepted solution]

Hallo dave

Yes, that's really the case. :) But there is a workaround: Create a temporary space, and move all the pages into that space. Then delete the space.

Cheers, Sarah

[Boris Capitanu]

Sarah, Does this really make sense? How obvious is a feature that allows you to delete multiple pages at a time (by placing a checkmark next to each page you want to delete in your page tree)? If I have a page that has 30 children, and I want to delete 20 of them, all the workarounds mentioned on this page are still time-consuming.

[Tanya L Christensen]

And ... creating a temp space requires that you're a Confluence Admin - which is not the case for most content contributors. Our program restricts admin access to a few people. We have hundreds of general contributors so they workaround is not practical for us.

[Scott Welker]

I'll have to agree with Boris and Tanya. This is not only not a good option, for most users it simply will not work.

I know! I know! Plugins, plugins, plugins. That too is an option that is simply no good for most end users .

For what it's worth, I'll definitely steer future clients away from this product unless they're already invested in the ecosystem.

[Gabriel Radic]

FWIW, this workaround does it for me:

1. Use Content Tools > Reorder Pages to move all pages under one page. 
2. Move the parent page to a new "Delete me" space only accessible to you
3. Delete the space

It's clunky, but it does help when you deal with dozens of pages. 

[Tracy Anderson]

Thanks Gabriel.  That was a great workaround. Saved me lots of time

[Adrian Schlatter]

Holy crap.

[Steffen Heller]

You can also move all your pages to one parent page and then delete the parent page as described at Delete a parent page AND its child pages?

[Mick Davidson]

This is the answer, no messing around with finding and installing plugins either! :)

[Gabriel Roncancio Reyes]

Nice workaround!

[Scott Guymer]

This no longer works as it now gives the deleted pages parent page all its child pages on deletion.

[Tanya L Christensen]

Yes - this is not good. Thankfully I read the notice before hitting OK -- otherwise I would have had 80 sub pages in a totally incorrect location. BRING BACK recursive deleted PLEASE!!!!! -- or at least the OPTION to do it.

[Steffen Heller]

From what I see this workaround at "Delete a parent page AND its child pages?" still works as ever (just checked). Perhaps @Scott Guymer can explain what he thinks doesn't work!?

[Scott Beeson]

I don't even see a way to move multiple pages at once so I'm not sure how this is better. Am I missing something?

[Steffen Heller]

@Scott Beeson With Browse > Pages > View: Tree you can move page pretty quickly

[Steffen Heller]

Correction: "...move pages..." And yes, still moving pages only one by one. Because: these are all just workarounds, not solutions.

[Steffen Stamprath]

Hi,

here a good plugin for deleting all or selected comments from a page:

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/aptis.plugins.deleteAllComments

[Stephan Sutter]

Hi David,

Our Page Tree Eraser plugin does exactly what you are looking for. When a user deletes a page tree, it gets moved to the trash bin space. Additionally the page titles get enhanced with the current date, time, user and space key. Like this there are no conflicts within the trash bin space.

Regards,
Stephan

[Aaron Shapiro]

Looks like I'll have to give this a try, glad it works on Cloud. What a shame, 8 years, millions of dollars, and shrinking growth yet Atlassian still isn't fixing issues and plugging functional holes that customers have been screaming about for years. Thankfully 3rd parties like yourself have us covered... For a price of course. Maybe if they want to reverse the shrinking growth they should start listening to customers. 

[Scott Beeson]

8 years later...

Fantastic.  So I'm going to have to either delete 64 pages or use a "workaround".

[Stefano Coletta]

Nowadays it can be done in a simpler way:

1. Use Content Tools > Reorder Pages to move all pages under one page that is to be deleted. 
2. Delete that page by flagging also the checkbox Also delete child pages

[Scott Beeson]

Simpler, but still not ideal.

I just had to reorder 60+ pages because someone accidentally cloned a page with children and then deleted the parent page without deleting the children.  

Would be nice if I could just multiselect pages.  Anywhere.

[Scott Beeson]

Wait a minute, where is this checkbox you are talking about?!

[Stefano Coletta]

Here it is when you DELETE a Page with children.

This is on Confluence Server.

[Carole Girard]

The Cloud version does not have that check box..... again....a simple option that should obviously be included but is not.

[Scott Beeson]

Absolutely insane. How could a simple feature like deleting a page be so drastically different from one platform to another?

[Peter Martin]

Suggestion:

Is it too silly to suggest an approach like this might be provided by Atlassian? :

1. The current export commands create .zip files
2. Zip file creation tools usually (e.g. in Linux, UNIX etc) have an option to "move" files into a zip archive (i.e, insert in the zip archive and delete original)
3. If the "move" approach were available as an archiving / export / whatever option, there would be :
   a.) a safeguard  and b) tree deletion (with full effect, if required, by deletion of the .zip file)

[Midori]

If the "junk pages" are the ones that were not updated for a certain period or were not viewed for a certain period or already tagged with archive label, then you can use the Archiving Plugin to automatically find them and move them to an archive space. 

It is usually a good idea to keep the archive (so that you can search or even restore the pages that look "junk" now), but you can completely delete that.

Read the add-on manual here

[Ghazi Ben Jalel]

If you move your pages to a new space, you'll lose the links inside them.

[Scott Welker]

If your goal is to delete them then this doesn't seem like much of a concern to me.

[David Meacock]

There's another workaround I found, similar to Sarah's above.

The delete-pagetree plugin can be used to delete all children of a parent page, so throw them all under a common parent and choose delete pagetree and hey presto.

This really should be a default feature though, the option to pick and choose pages for deletion :(

[Mick Davidson]

Thanks, I'll take a look at this. And it's free! :)