Creating a help center portal

A help center portal is a public-facing knowledge base where your customers can find answers without contacting support. By providing well-organized, easy-to-search articles, you can reduce ticket volume, improve customer satisfaction, and empower your team to focus on more complex issues.

Why create a help center portal?

Many customers prefer to solve problems on their own before reaching out to a support agent. A well-maintained help center gives them instant access to guides, FAQs, and troubleshooting steps. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It also serves as a resource your AI bot can reference when answering questions automatically.

Creating your portal

1. Navigate to Help Center from the main sidebar.
2. Click Get Started.
3. Enter the following details:
   • Name. A descriptive title for your portal (e.g., "Acme Support Center").
   • Slug. The URL-friendly identifier that becomes your help center's web address, {slug}.deskwoot.com. Keep it short and lowercase (e.g., acme-support).
   • Brand color. The accent color of your help center. You can change it later, and add a subtitle that tells visitors what kind of help they can find, in the Settings tab.
4. Click Create Portal. It will be created in draft mode so you can add content before making it public.

Adding your first content

1. Create categories to organize your articles into logical groups (e.g., "Getting Started," "Billing," "Integrations").
2. Write articles within each category. Use clear headings, short paragraphs, and step-by-step instructions to make content easy to scan.
3. Publish each article when it is ready for customers to see.
4. Go live: when you are ready, switch the help center from Draft to Live with the status pill in the preview.

Best-practice tips

• Start with high-impact topics. Review your most common support tickets and create articles that address those questions first.
• Use descriptive titles. Write article titles as questions or clear phrases customers are likely to search for (e.g., "How do I reset my password?").
• Keep articles focused. Each article should answer one question or cover one task. This makes content easier to find and maintain.
• Review and update regularly. Set a recurring reminder to audit your help center for outdated information, broken links, or missing topics.
• Add visuals when helpful. Screenshots and short videos can make complex instructions much easier to follow.

Common pitfalls to avoid

• Choosing a vague slug. Once your portal is live and indexed by search engines, changing the slug can break existing links. Pick a meaningful slug from the start.
• Leaving categories empty. A category without published articles stays hidden on your help center home page, so publish at least one article in every category you want visitors to see.
• Overly long articles. Walls of text discourage readers. Break content into sections with headings and bullet points.

Frequently asked questions