Help Center portal settings

Overview

The portal is the public site of your Help Center: the home page, the categories, the articles and the search your customers reach without logging in. Everything that defines how that site looks and behaves lives in Help Center → (portal) → Settings, at the .../portals/<slug>/settings route of the dashboard.

The screen has four vertical tabs:

There is one more setting that does not live on that screen: the recommended content, chosen per locale on the portal's Locales page.

Prerequisites

• The Help Center feature (help_center) must be enabled on the account — it ships enabled by default. With the feature off, the public portal pages stop serving content and show an inactive-help-center notice instead.
• A portal already created on the account.
• To edit the analytics section you must be an account administrator. The restriction is enforced on both ends: the cards only render for administrators, and the API drops analytics fields sent by anyone who is not an administrator — even when their role may edit the other portal settings. The reason is stated in the code itself: analytics injects tracking scripts into every public page.
• For a custom domain, access to the domain's DNS panel.

Step by step

1. Open Help Center in the sidebar and select the portal you want to configure.
2. Click Settings. The General tab opens first.
3. In General, adjust name, identifier, page title, header text, color and logo. The save button only enables once something changes.
4. In Domain, click Add (or Edit) and enter the custom domain. On save the platform opens the DNS dialog with the record ready to copy, in the form your-domain CNAME <installation host>. You can e-mail those instructions to whoever manages the DNS.
5. In Appearance, pick the layout and, on the Documentation layout, add the social links.
6. In Integrations, pick the live chat widget and fill in the analytics identifiers you want to use. Click Save Changes.
7. For recommended content, go back to the Help Center, open Locales, click the menu of the locale you want and choose Select recommended content.

Settings & options

Recommended content per locale

The Recommended content dialog lets you pin, for each locale, which categories and which articles are featured on the home page:

• Up to 3 categories and up to 6 articles. The counter shows how many slots are left.
• Order matters: drag the items into the sequence visitors should see. The home page honors exactly that order.
• Article search runs on the server and only considers published articles of that locale.
• Saving with both lists empty removes the selection for that locale, and the portal falls back to the automatic defaults.

How the home page decides what to show:

Two rules avoid surprises: a recommended category does not need published articles to show up, unlike the automatic list, which only considers categories with at least one published article. Visibility, though, is not negotiable — categories and articles restricted to operators never surface on the public portal, and items deleted after the pick simply drop out of the list.

Layout

Two options, stored on the portal:

• Classic — a welcoming home page with search and featured topics.
• Documentation (marked beta) — side-by-side navigation that keeps every guide one click away.

Any value other than these two is treated as Classic. There is also an internal "plain" variant (?show_plain_layout=true), used by the article preview inside the dashboard — it is not a configuration option.

Social links

The social links section appears only when the layout is Documentation, because it is that layout's footer that renders the icons. There are eight networks, and you type only the handle — the platform builds the full address:

Removing a link clears the stored handle. The footer disappears entirely when no network is filled in and the platform signature is turned off — either by the account's whitelabel or by the signature removal configured for the whole installation.

Custom domain

• The domain is unique across the whole installation: two portals cannot point to the same address.
• The field only accepts a bare domain such as help.yourcompany.com. Pasting a full address, with https:// or with a path, is refused in the dialog itself with a format error.
• The DNS dialog shows the CNAME record ready to go, with a copy button.
• E-mailing the instructions requires a valid address and a domain already configured on the portal — without that, the action is refused with a message explaining why.
• The certificate status (Live / Pending / Error) and the refresh-status button only appear on cloud-hosted accounts. On self-hosted installations the certificate is your infrastructure's responsibility.

Live chat

The Live chat with ConversaLabs card connects a website widget inbox to the portal, so the visitor can talk to the team while reading the articles. The list only shows website widget inboxes; picking No widget disconnects the portal from any widget.

Analytics providers

Seven providers, each with its identifier and a format validated before saving:

How this is injected into the portal:

• The script block goes into the <head> of every public portal page — except the internal article preview (plain layout), precisely so the preview does not count as a visit.
• Google Tag Manager and Meta Pixel also get their noscript version (iframe and image pixel) right at the start of the <body>, for browsers with JavaScript disabled.
• The Meta Pixel fires PageView on every internal portal navigation, not only on the first load.
• Leaving a field blank disables that provider: empty values are dropped on submit.

Use cases

• Product launch: pin the new product's category to the top pills and the 6 getting-started articles as recommended, in the target audience's locale.
• Multilingual Help Center: choose different recommendations per locale — the Spanish audience sees the Spanish guides featured, with no effect on Portuguese.
• Technical knowledge base: use the Documentation layout, with side navigation and social links in the footer.
• Your own brand: publish the Help Center at help.yourcompany.com with a custom domain and logo.
• Content measurement: connect GA4 to measure traffic and Microsoft Clarity to see heatmaps of which articles stall the visitor.
• Advertising: use the Meta Pixel to measure conversions and build audiences from people who read the Help Center.

Tips, limits & best practices

• The 3 categories and 6 articles limits are hard. If you try to store more than that through the API, only the first items of the list are considered.
• Prefer one Google Tag Manager container over several loose scripts: you can swap tags without going back to the dashboard.
• Do not run GTM and GA4 for the same property at once — that double-counts visits.
• Treat analytics identifiers as high-impact configuration: they add third-party scripts to public pages, which affects performance and privacy. Review your cookie policy before turning on heatmaps and session recordings.
• Revisit your recommendations after archiving or deleting articles: the item disappears from the portal, but the list keeps a slot occupied until you edit it.
• Two people can save different tabs at the same time without wiping each other's work — the platform locks the record while saving and merges onto the latest version.
• The portal's default locale cannot be marked as a draft.

Troubleshooting

"Invalid analytics configuration" — the request carried an analytics field that does not exist or a value that is not text. Use only the seven fields in the table above.

A message says an analytics field is invalid — the value does not match the expected format. Check the prefix (GTM-, G-) and the character type: Hotjar and Meta Pixel accept digits only. The dashboard also flags the field in red and blocks the save button before submitting.

The Save button is disabled — either nothing has changed since the last save, or some field has an invalid format, or a save is still in flight.

I cannot see the analytics cards — they are exclusive to account administrators.

Events do not show up when I open the article preview from the dashboard — that is the expected behavior: the internal preview does not load analytics scripts, so your metrics are not polluted by your own team's traffic.

A recommended article does not appear on the home page — check that it is published, that it is public (not operator-only), that it belongs to the same locale as the recommendation, and that it was not deleted after the pick.

The featured articles block does not appear on the Classic layout — without recommended content, that block needs at least 6 published articles inside visible categories of the locale; below that it stays hidden. Picking recommended articles shows the block at any count.

I set up the social links and the footer still has no icons — social links are only rendered on the Documentation layout.

The certificate status does not appear — it is only shown on cloud accounts; on a self-hosted installation, check the certificate in your own infrastructure.

The DNS instructions are not sent — confirm the portal already has a custom domain saved and that the e-mail address you entered is valid.

See also

• Integrations
• Custom Scripts: injecting JS/CSS into the dashboard, portal and widget
• Whitelabel
• Website channel (widget)