How to add a help center to your site

In TeleportHQ, the Help Center is a built-in feature for guides and answers, built like the Blog: in the editor's left sidebar, click Plugins, click Help Center, switch on Help Center enabled and confirm in the Activate Help Center window. TeleportHQ builds a help center at /help, with a search box, a page for every article at /help/ followed by the article's address, and a page for every category. You write the articles in the Help Center panel, and published articles show on your live site within seconds.

Before you start#

• The TeleportHQ Help Center needs a web app. Articles are stored in a database and loaded live. On a Presentation Website, the Enable Web App features? window opens when you activate the help center. After that, you can no longer download the project's code. See How to turn a website into a web app.
• A web app needs a Web App slot to stay online. The Trial and Premium plans include 1 Web App slot. Pro includes none, but you can buy one. See Why does my web app need a slot, and what is the 7-day window?
• The articles need a database. The built-in TeleportHQ database is picked for you. You can also use your own Supabase, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, Firestore, Airtable, CockroachDB, TiDB or Turso database.
• The Help Center and the Blog are separate. A project can have both, each with its own posts, categories and settings.

Steps#

1. Switch the Help Center on#

1. Open your project in the TeleportHQ editor.
2. In the left sidebar, click Plugins (below the plugin icons, above Growth).
3. Click the Help Center row ("Documentation and help articles, their pages and categories."). Its pill shows Off until the help center is on. A drawer titled Help Center opens beside the list.
4. In the drawer, under Feature, switch on Help Center enabled. (Or, under Panel, click Open next to Help Center panel: the Help Center panel shows Help Center Not Activated; click Activate Help Center. Both start the same setup.)

5. If your project is a Presentation Website, the Enable Web App features? window opens. Read the warnings, then click Enable Web App features. TeleportHQ first saves a backup named Before Web App features Enabled, unless the project still holds nothing but an empty home page. To stop here instead, click Keep as a Presentation Website.

Another way: open the Project Menu (the TeleportHQ logo at the top left), point to Edit and click Enable Plugins…. In the Choose your plugins window, tick Help center and click Enable 1 plugin. On a Presentation Website, the Enable Web App features? window opens first. This sets the TeleportHQ Help Center up without the Activate Help Center window: the articles go in the TeleportHQ database, and no link to the help center is added to your navigation or footer. When it's done, the message "Help Center has been activated successfully!" appears. Skip to What TeleportHQ creates.

2. Confirm the setup#

1. The Activate Help Center window lists what the help center adds: articles with rich text, list and grid blocks, an article page, categories, tags and featured images, and a help-center folder for the pages.
2. If your site has a navigation or a footer, two switches, Add it to your navigation and Add it to your footer, add a link to the help center there. TeleportHQ places the links with AI. Turn them off to add the link yourself.
3. Click Continue. If your project already has a database that another feature uses, such as your store, the button reads Activate Help Center and the setup starts right away.

4. On the Data Source step, keep TeleportHQ database selected, or pick one of your own databases, and click Continue.
5. A checklist titled Setting up your help center appears. When it says Your help center is ready, click Open my help center. The canvas opens your help center's main page.

What TeleportHQ creates#

• A Help Center button in the left sidebar, above Plugins. It opens the Help Center panel: the list of your articles, with More (the three dots), Import Articles, Help Center Settings (the gear) and New Article (the +) at the top. While the list is empty, it offers Create Article and Import articles. From two articles on, a Reorder button beside the search box lets you drag them into your own order.

• A help-center folder in Pages, Components & Tree View, with three pages:
  • help-articles-list: your help center's main page, at /help.
  • help-article-details: each article, at /help/ followed by the article's address, for example /help/how-do-i-change-my-order.
  • help-category-details: each category, at /help/category/ followed by the category's address. It lists the category's subcategories and articles. An article keeps its address when you move it to another category.

• A main page built for searching. The /help page starts with the Home page layout: a panel with the title at the left and the category filter, the sort and the search box beside it, your categories as cards under Browse by topic, and the articles below as text cards, without pictures. To show your topics in a list that stays in view beside the articles instead, pick Sidebar in Help Center Settings → Listing → Listing Page Settings → Layout → Page layout. The same settings choose the filters, search, sort and cards. See How to design the blog list and post pages, which works the same for the Help Center.
• Article pages made for reading. Each article shows a Contents list of its sections beside it (on articles with three sections or more), every heading links to its own place, and Previous and Next links at the end follow the order you set. See How to show a table of contents beside a post or article and How to put posts or articles in your own order.

To write your first article, click New Article (the +), type a title such as How do I change my order?, write the answer and click Create Article. The form is the same as the Blog's. See How to write and publish a blog post. To bring in many articles at once, for example from another help center, see How to import Markdown files into your blog or help center.

How the Help Center differs from the Blog#

The TeleportHQ Help Center and Blog share the same editor, authors list, import and export, and bulk actions. They start with different settings, and a few Blog features aren't in the Help Center:

What starts differently (category pages, the order, the Contents list) can be switched later in Help Center Settings or Blog Settings, under Listing and Article page (Post page for the Blog).

Check that it worked#

• The Help Center button is in the left sidebar, and its panel lists your articles.
• The help-center folder holds the three pages.
• After you publish, open /help on your live site. New and edited articles show there within seconds, without publishing again. See How to publish a web app.

Troubleshooting#

"You have reached the maximum number of help center activations for this project." A project can activate the help center up to 10 times, and turning it off and on again counts each time.

"Your help center could not be set up" Something failed, and TeleportHQ undid the partial changes. Click Close, then click Activate Help Center in the Help Center panel again.

The Help Center panel says Help Center Pages Deleted The help center pages were deleted, but your articles, categories and help center settings were kept. Click Activate Help Center to build the pages again.

Good to know#

• Pictures you add to articles are uploaded to a help-center folder inside Public in the Assets Manager.
• When your workspace has at least 2,000 AI tokens, the setup writes the main page's SEO title and description with AI.
• On a project the AI website builder made, TeleportHQ then lays out the new main page's filters, search, sort and cards with AI, which needs at least 100 AI tokens.
• Help Center articles can be scheduled like Blog posts: on the TeleportHQ database, an article you schedule with Schedule publishes itself at its date. See How to schedule a blog post.
• An article written with Generate with AI gets a cover picture only while Card pictures is on in Listing Page Settings. It's off at the start, so AI-written articles start without one.
• Help Center Settings → Writing style picks how Generate with AI writes new articles: Task-oriented or Storytelling. The same choice is in the Generate Article with AI window, and a Generate article with AI button under the setting opens a new article with it. See How to generate blog posts with AI.
• To turn the help center off, see How to turn off the blog, which covers the Help Center too.