How to Launch a Help Center on Your Own Domain with DocStar

With DocStar you can launch a branded help center at help.yourcompany.com (or yourcompany.com/help) in an afternoon: create a Doc collection, write or import your articles, add your logo and colors, connect your domain with one DNS record, and publish. Your help center then comes with search, Ask AI, FAQs, analytics and SEO files built in, so customers find answers without opening a ticket.

This guide walks through every step in DocStar, from an empty workspace to a live help center on your own domain.

A help center on your own domain is more than a nice touch:

• Trust. Customers see your URL and your brand, not a third-party link.

• Search traffic. In DocStar, pages on the default DocStar link are marked noindex. Connecting a custom domain is what lets Google and other search engines index your help articles.

• One experience. Your help center looks and feels like part of your product and website.

• AI-ready. On a subdomain, DocStar serves sitemap.xml, robots.txt and llms.txt at the root of your domain, so search engines and AI assistants can find every article.

In DocStar, every docs site is a collection with its own settings, theme and domain. A help center gets its own collection.

1. In the left sidebar, click Add Collection.

2. Give it a name, such as "Help Center".

3. Choose a slug. It's used by AI agents (MCP) and the CLI and can never be changed, so your company or product name is a good choice.

4. Under Select Type, choose Doc.

5. Click Create Collection.

[Screenshot: DocStar Create Collection dialog with type set to Doc]

Organize articles the way customers think: top-level pages for categories ("Getting Started", "Billing", "Account & Security") and subpages for individual articles.

• Click + (Add Page) in the sidebar, name the page and start writing. Type / to open blocks like headings, tables, images, code blocks and callouts.

• Drag pages in the sidebar to reorder them.

• Your teammates can edit the same page at the same time in DocStar's real-time collaborative editor.

Moving from another tool? You don't have to copy and paste. Go to Settings → Collection Actions → Import Pages and drop in your .md, .markdown or .mdx files. You can select several at once.

Want a head start? DocStar's AI can draft a page, write summaries and suggest SEO details for you. Treat it as a first draft and review before you publish. See how AI helps you create and maintain docs.

New pages start as drafts that only your team can see, so you can build the whole help center before anyone outside sees it.

Open the collection, click Settings in the left sidebar, and work through these tabs. Most of them save and publish in one step, so readers see the new look as soon as you click Save.

• Add HomePage Title: the heading at the top of your landing page. Leave it empty and readers see "How can we help?".

• Logo and favicon: paste your logo URL and upload a PNG, ICO or SVG favicon.

• Colors, corner style and fonts: pick a heading font and a content font to match your product.

• Visible Components: turn the homepage, sidebar, header, footer, feedback widget, breadcrumbs, table of contents and Ask AI Button on or off.

Add your own HTML header and footer with navigation, links back to your app and contact details. Write it by hand or generate it with AI.

In Settings → Templates, pick a layout such as Default Theme (fixed sidebar and sticky table of contents) or Hover Sidebar. Or click Build with AI on the AI Generated Theme card and describe the page you want, for example: "A hero with a search bar, cards for Getting Started, Billing and Account, and a contact section." Every result is saved as a version you can customize, preview and publish.

[Screenshot: DocStar Templates tab with the AI Generated Theme card]

For more on look and voice, read Your Docs, Your Brand: Themes, Domains and a Consistent Voice.

This is the step that turns a docs site into your help center. DocStar supports two setups:

1. In your collection, go to Settings → Domain.

2. In Domain Name, enter your subdomain, for example help.yourcompany.com. Leave Path empty.

3. Click Save.

4. At your DNS provider, add one record:

DNS changes can take a few minutes to a few hours. Then open https://help.yourcompany.com to check.

1. In Settings → Domain, enter your main domain (for example yourcompany.com) in Domain Name and a single-segment path like /help in Path. Click Save.

2. Click View Code and copy the Cloudflare Worker code. Your domain, path and collection ID are already filled in.

3. In Cloudflare, create a Worker, paste the code and click Deploy.

4. Add a Worker route such as yourcompany.com/help* and select your Worker.

A few rules DocStar checks when you save: the domain field holds only the domain, the path is one segment starting with /, and you can't combine a subdomain with a path. Full details are in the Custom Domain guide.

[Screenshot: DocStar Domain settings tab with Domain Name and Path fields]

FAQs are where a help center earns its keep. In DocStar, click FAQ in the left sidebar.

• Add FAQs by hand. Manual FAQs go live right away. If DocStar spots a similar FAQ, it asks whether to update the existing one or save a new one.

• Generate FAQs with AI. Choose AI Generate, paste a help article, release notes or rough notes, and click Generate FAQs. Suggestions wait in the Pending tab, and nothing goes live until you approve it.

• Tag them. Tags help DocStar match FAQs to the right articles.

Approved FAQs show up in three places: a public FAQ page at /faq on your domain, under Frequently Asked Questions at the bottom of related articles, and inside Ask AI answers. Learn more in Smart FAQs: From Static Lists to Answers People and AI Can Find.

Every published DocStar site has a search bar ("Ask AI or search docs...") where customers can type a question and get an AI answer drawn from your docs instead of a list of links. On any article they can also choose Ask AI about this page.

Want the same help inside your product? The DocStar Search SDK adds your help center search and Ask AI to your website or web app with two script tags. Users press Cmd/Ctrl + K and get answers without leaving your app.

Once your domain is connected, DocStar handles the technical SEO:

• Meta details per page. Open a page, click the gear icon, and fill in Meta Title, Meta Description and Tags under SEO Configuration, or click Generate with AI.

• AI SEO Score. After publishing, each page gets a score out of 100 with suggestions you can apply with AI.

• Sitemap and llms.txt. DocStar generates both automatically.

• Markdown for every page. Add .md to any article URL to get clean Markdown that AI crawlers read reliably.

Read more in SEO, Sitemap and llms.txt and Is Your Documentation Readable by AI?

1. Publish your articles: open each page, click the gear icon and click Publish (or bulk publish many at once).

2. Go to Settings → Publish Collection and click Publish Collection. The live URL switches to your custom domain.

Serving customers in other languages? Open Settings → Localization and pick from Hindi, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Portuguese and Russian. DocStar uses AI to translate your published pages in the background, and readers get a language switcher. See Multiple Languages.

Need a private help center for partners or beta customers? As the workspace Owner, turn on Password protect this collection under Access Control in the Publish Collection tab. Readers unlock it for 24 hours with the password. For tighter control at the network edge, see Lock the Gates: How to Give VIP Access to Your Docs.

Click Analytics in the left sidebar to see how your help center is used:

• Reads per article, so you know which pages matter most.

• Reader feedback from "Was this helpful?" votes and comments, so you can fix confusing articles.

• UTM traffic, so you can see which emails, in-app links and campaigns send people to each page.

• SEO score per page, to find articles that need better titles or descriptions.

Sort by reads, then check feedback on your top pages. That's usually where a quick rewrite saves the most tickets.

• Everything in one workspace. Help docs, FAQs, API docs, changelog and blog live side by side in DocStar, each as its own collection with its own domain.

• Your brand, your domain. Themes, fonts, custom header and footer, an AI-built landing page and CNAME or path-based hosting.

• Self-service built in. Ask AI, a public FAQ page, FAQs under articles and a Search SDK for your app.

• AI-ready from day one. Sitemap, llms.txt and Markdown copies of every page, plus a hosted MCP server for every collection so AI assistants can search your help content.

• Less busywork. AI drafting, FAQ generation, SEO meta and translations, always with a review step before anything goes live.

• Measurable. Reads, feedback and UTM sources in one dashboard.

How long does it take to launch a help center with DocStar? Most teams can set up the collection, branding and domain in an afternoon. DNS changes for a CNAME can take a few minutes to a few hours to take effect.

Can I host my DocStar help center at yourcompany.com/help instead of a subdomain? Yes. Enter your main domain and a path like /help in Settings → Domain, then deploy the Cloudflare Worker code DocStar gives you. Your domain needs to use Cloudflare for this method.

Will my help center show up in Google? Yes, once it's on your own domain. Pages on the default DocStar link are marked noindex; a custom domain lets search engines index them, and DocStar generates your sitemap automatically.

Can I move my existing help articles into DocStar? Yes. Import Markdown files (.md, .markdown or .mdx) from Settings → Collection Actions → Import Pages. Imported content lands as drafts so you can review it before publishing.

Can I keep some help content private? You can password-protect a whole published collection. To keep only some articles private, put them in a separate collection.

Your customers already have questions. Give them a help center on your own domain that answers them, and lets AI answer them too.

Get started free with DocStar →