How to Edit the Confluence Storage Format (And When You'd Need To)
- Confluence admins fixing broken pages, macros, or corrupted formatting
- Developers migrating or bulk-editing page content via the storage format
- Power users who need find-and-replace across a page's underlying XML
- What the Confluence storage format is and why you'd edit it directly
- How to open the raw XML of a page and make safe changes
- Formatting, find-and-replace, and diffing changes before saving
- When editing storage format is the right tool (and when it isn't)
Most Confluence users never see it, but every page is stored as an XML document in Confluence's storage format — a specific XHTML dialect with custom tags for macros, layouts, and embeddings. The visual editor hides this. But sometimes the only way to fix a problem is to edit that XML directly: a macro is corrupted and won't render, a copy-paste introduced broken formatting, or you need to find-and-replace a URL across a long page that the visual editor can't reach.
Confluence exposes the storage format through its REST API, but there's no built-in visual editor for it. Raw Storage Source Editor for Confluence adds one — a Monaco-powered editor that opens the raw storage XML of any page, with format, find-and-replace, and (in the Pro edition) a diff view. This guide covers when and how to use it safely.