Write and organize articles

Articles live on the help center's Articles tab in Settings > Help center. Only admins write and publish them. Every change is saved as a draft first, so you can work on a live article without customers seeing half-finished text.

Categories#

Categories group articles on the help center's home page. Articles with no category are listed last, under "Uncategorized articles" in the settings.

• New category asks for a name, such as "Shipping and delivery", and an optional one-line Description shown under it on the home page.

• Rename, reorder or delete a category from its row. Deleting one keeps its articles: they move to Uncategorized articles.

• Categories are one level deep; there are no subcategories.

A category shows on the site only when it has at least one article published in that language.

Write an article#

1. On the Articles tab, click New article, or the new article button on a category's row to start inside it.

2. Write the Title and the body. The editor has two heading levels, bold, italic, underline, links, numbered and bulleted lists, quotes and images. Text pasted from a web page or a document is cleaned of its styling as it goes in.

3. In the side panel, pick the Category, check the address, and add an Excerpt if you want: one or two sentences shown in lists and search results. Without one, the first words of the article are used.

4. Click Save draft, or Publish when it is ready.

The address of an article looks like /articles/100004-returns: a number and a part made from the title. The title part is made when you first save and stays when you change the title, unless you edit it yourself. The help center finds articles by their number, so links in replies you already sent keep working even after a rename.

Drafts and publishing#

Each article in each language has a working copy and a published copy.

An article with an empty body cannot be published. You can also publish and unpublish from the list without opening the article. There is no history of earlier versions beyond these two copies, and no preview of a draft on the public site; the editor shows the body in the site's article style.

Order articles#

Articles show in each category in the order of the list. Drag a row onto another row or onto a category, or use the arrow buttons. The search box above the list looks through titles, excerpts and category names.

Languages#

When the help center offers more than one language, the language switch above the list chooses which version you see and write. Each category and article holds its words separately per language.

• An article missing a language is not shown in that language, and the list offers Translate to write it.

• Delete this version removes one language of an article and keeps the others. Delete article removes it in every language, and its links stop working.

Add or remove the help center's languages in Preferences; see Customize your help center.

Link articles in replies#

Any agent can send an article. In the reply box, the Insert a help center article button searches published articles of live help centers, newest first before you type, and puts a link to the article where your cursor was, in a reply or an internal note.

Chats can also list your newest articles and suggest matching ones to visitors; see Article recommendations in chat.

What is not available#

Generating articles with AI, from your tickets or from your store's pages, is not built, and neither is a library of AI-suggested articles. Write them yourself, starting from the questions in your help center statistics that found no answer.