I’m starting of this new year with some exciting news! At least, I think so. My Help Scout Docs plugin for WordPress has just gotten a huge makeover and I’m going to tell you all about it in this blogpost.
What’s WP Help Scout Docs?
Help Scout Docs requires no introduction. WP Help Scout Docs allows you to easily integrate Help Scout Docs with WordPress, and solves a few problems in the process.
Help Scout Docs (and most popular support platforms) has a few drawbacks:
First is privacy. Since it’s a 3rd party platform and yet an essential part of your website, complying with privacy laws, such as the GDPR, becomes a minefield. A quote from their documentation:
Help Scout’s Help Desk and Beacon features are GDPR compliant. However, Help Scout’s Docs knowledge base is not, when it comes to storing customer information.
In other words, to workaround this, you would have to make your users aware of the fact that they’re being redirected to a 3rd party and collect prior consent before doing so. And then they would have to give prior consent again to Help Scout Docs to allow the data collection! Clunky, don’t you agree?
Second, there’s SEO. Help Scout Docs URLs are anything but pretty. It’s somewhat resolved by their Custom Domain feature, but then there’s still the lack of structure. Help Scout Docs’ URL structure is as follows:
- Categories are prepended by “category”, followed by a unique identifier (UID) and the slug. E.g.
/category/100-sales
. - Articles are prepended by “article”, followed by a UID and the slug. E.g.
/article/20-change-address
.
SEO experts dictate that the URL should reveal the inner structure of the website, just like breadcrumbs would. So, if an article belongs to a certain category, the URL structure should be /docs/sales/change-address
. Anything that makes the bot better understand the structure of your website, is good for your ranking. It’s that simple, yet Help Scout Docs (and other platforms) doesn’t do this.
Finally, there’s the simple issue of UX, or User Experience. It doesn’t “feel” very smooth, having to direct your user to an external website for help with your product or service.
WP Help Scout Docs is a plugin for users who have a “Documentation” (or “Docs”) section on their WordPress website pointing to Help Scout Docs. It allows you to render your Docs categories and articles in WordPress pages, and solves the above mentioned drawbacks as follows:
- Privacy: WP Help Scout Docs caches the articles in WordPress, so they’re served from the same server, i.e. 1st party. Therefore, no prior consent required.
- SEO: It uses WordPress’ native pages hierarchy features, creating an URL structure crawler bots prefer, i.e.
/docs/category-name/article-name
. - UX: Because the article contents are rendered as part of your WordPress pages, they look the same as the rest of your website, therefore offering a smoother user experience.
Basically, WP Help Scout Docs is Help Scout Docs on speed.
Cool! So what’s new in V2.0?
Up until now, WP Help Scout Docs required some technical skills to make it work properly. Honestly, there were too many factors at play for the average WordPress user.
V2.0 of WP Help Scout Docs introduces several new features to improve the ease of use and performance of your website’s Documentation section:
- Categories and articles are now cached with
autoload
turned off. This improves all-round performance of your WordPress website, depending on the size of your Help Scout Docs. - The overall onboarding process of the plugin is greatly improved as well, as the Collection ID no longer has to be manually copied and pasted into the
shortcode. An option is now added to the plugin’s settings screen which allows you to choose the collection (by name) you wish to render.
- Finally, I’ve added a Build Docs button, which basically primes the cache to speed up initial performance of your site’s Documentation.
I think these additions will improve the onboarding process and performance of this WP Help Scouts. If you haven’t yet, give WP Help Scout Docs a try!
Rounding Up
Plugins are like children. Even though WP Help Scout Docs is a plugin that’s very niche and not widely used (yet), all my plugins deserve equal attention. This release is a big step to a more professional, streamlined experience with which I hope to give this plugins its well-deserved place in the WordPress universe.