However, people are still always going to need phone support, and there are also plenty of non-support reasons that you might want to make it easy for your website's visitors to give you a call.

But when people are browsing on a mobile device, the last thing you want to do is make them type in your phone number themselves, or have to try and click on some tiny phone number. Instead, a click to call button makes a much better option.

In this post, we'll show you how you can add WordPress click to call functionality to your website using both some simple free plugins or your own HTML. No matter what your technical knowledge level is, you'll be able to follow along and create a great-looking click to call button.

We rigorously test and research every product that we recommend through HeroThemes. Our review process. We may also earn a commission if you make a purchase through our links.

Should You Use A Click To Call Plugin Or HTML?

Using a plugin is the simplest way to create something that looks great. So if you want something that will “just work” right away, that would be a good reason to go the plugin route. However, you'll be limited to only displaying your call button in the location(s) that the plugin supports.

If you want to be able to add your click to call button anywhere on your site, or just don't fancy using another plugin, adding click to call functionality with your own HTML is almost as simple as inserting a hyperlink, so it's still a pretty user-friendly approach. However, you'll probably need to add some basic custom CSS to make it look good, which is something to keep in mind.

In this guide, we'll show you both methods. Let's get started, beginning with the plugin route…

Approach 1: Use A Free WordPress Click To Call Button Plugin

There are several different WordPress click to call plugins, but we're going to show you step-by-step guides for just three of them:

• Really Simple Click To Call Bar – rather than adding a standalone button, this plugin adds an entire bar to the bottom of mobile visitors' screens. If you want to make it really obvious/easy for people to call you, this is a good option.
• Call Now Button – in addition to a full bar like the plugin above, this plugin also lets you use more of a floating action button-style call button.
• Call Now Button Ultimate – this plugin adds the same call now bottom bar. But the unique thing is that it lets you set “hours of operation” for when you're available via phone. During off hours, the button will prompt visitors to email instead of call.

Really Simple Click To Call Bar Plugin Tutorial

This plugin is free and available at WordPress.org, so you can install it right from your WordPress dashboard by going to Plugins → Add New.

Once you've installed and activated the plugin, go to Settings → Really Simple Click to Call to configure the plugin. There, you can:

• Enable the click to call button functionality
• Add a text CTA next to your call button
• Choose the phone number that visitors will call
• Configure the colors used on your click to call button

Then, save your changes to make your button live. This button will only appear to mobile visitors, so you won't see it if you're browsing from a desktop computer.

Here's an example of what it might look like on mobile:

Call Now Button Plugin Tutorial

As we mentioned above, the Call Now Button plugin is a little more flexible in that it also lets you use a floating action call now button in addition to the call now bar approach.

Like the others, it's listed at WordPress.org, which means that you can install it by going to Plugins → Add New.

Once you've installed and activated the plugin, head to Settings → Call Now Button to configure the plugin.

At the top, you can:

• Enable the button
• Enter the phone number that visitors will call
• Choose the button text (if desired)

You can also reveal more settings by clicking the Advanced settings link. That will let you change up positioning, colors, add click tracking, and more:

Once your button is enabled, it will display to mobile visitors only, so you'll need to preview it from a mobile device to see it in action.

Here's an example from our site of the floating action button approach:

Call Now Button Ultimate Plugin Tutorial

The unique thing about the Call Now Button Ultimate plugin is that you're able to choose which hours you want visitors to be able to call you. During off-hours when your phone number is unavailable, you can display a prompt for visitors to send an email instead.

Like the others, you can install and activate this free plugin by going to Plugins → Add New in your WordPress dashboard.

Once you've done that, go to the Call Now Button Ultimate area in your WordPress dashboard to set it up.

At the top, you can enable the plugin and enter your phone number and email address:

Then, further down the page, you can enter your hours of operation and configure the button text and colors:

Like the other plugins, your call now button will only display to mobile visitors.

Here's what it looks like during your hours of operation:

And here's what it looks like outside your hours of operation:

Approach 2: WordPress Click To Call HTML Button

As an alternative to the click to call WordPress plugins, you can also use your own click to call HTML to create a button. The benefit of this approach is that you'll be able to add your button anywhere on your site.

To create such a button, you can just use a normal hyperlink and wrap your phone number in the tel: schema.

Here's what it looks like – you just need to replace the example phone number with your own and edit the text CTA as needed:

<a href="tel:+1-123-456-7890">Call HeroThemes!</a>

That's all there is to it!

If you want, you can use your own custom CSS to create a button instead of a regular hyperlink.

For example, you could use this HTML:

<a href="tel:+1-123-456-7890" class="call-button">Call HeroThemes!</a>

Then, you could add some custom CSS to your WordPress site to make it into a button. For example:

.call-button {
  color: #fff !important;
  background: #0ba9d5;
  padding: 20px;
  border-radius: 5px;
  display: inline-block;
  border: none;
}

You can safely add custom CSS via the WordPress Customizer or a free plugin like Simple CSS.

Remember, though. By default, your click to call HTML button will be visible to all visitors, including those on desktop computers.

If you want to change that, you can use CSS media queries to only display the button on mobile devices. For example, this snippet will hide the button on screen sizes above 600px wide:

@media only screen and (min-width: 600px) {
  .call-button {
    display: none;   }
}

Start Using Your WordPress Click To Call Button Today!

Whether you use a plugin or your own custom HTML, it's easy to create a click to call button on WordPress.

With your button in place, it will be easier than ever for mobile visitors to get in touch with you.

Just remember – phone calls are heavy on human resources.

If you want to cut down on the number of phone calls that you receive, creating a WordPress knowledge base or FAQ section lets visitors get the help they need without requiring one-on-one phone support. And that can save you a ton of time and effort.

Learn how you can get started with our Heroic Knowledge Base plugin, KnowAll theme, or Heroic FAQs plugin.

The post How to Easily Add a Click-To-Call Button to Your WordPress Website first appeared on HeroThemes.

Maybe it for:

• Locking premium content behind log-in or subscription
• To collect email addresses or leads
• Internal resources
• Offering premium support
• Restricting digital downloads access

Even if it's for something else, we got you covered!

There are so many ways of restricting access to WordPress content. The trouble is…deciding on which is the right solution for your project.

In this guide, we will cover some of the easiest methods you can use to create WordPress members only pages, or restrict access to certain directories to create a member only area.

We rigorously test and research every product that we recommend through HeroThemes. Our review process. We may also earn a commission if you make a purchase through our links.

What Exactly Is a Members-Only Area With Restricted Access?

A members-only area of a website is made up of pages that hold content which are accessed by permission only (granted by the site administrator).

The site structure (how these pages link together) should favor users discovering what they need quickly and accurately.

It is generally accepted by web experts that a flat site architecture works best.

i.e. one where the content the user wants to find is easily found and isn’t deeply buried.

Here’s a model example of what an effective flat site architecture might look like:

Image source: Backlinko

The golden rule governing flat site architecture says that pages should never be more than 2 clicks away from the home page.

Plus, the link to the any desired page should be easy to find on the referring page.

Features like: automated related article links, listed categorical homepage links, breadcrumb link, related page sidebar links, jump links to relevant sub-headings etc…achieve this goal well.

Though the most critical page to get right in this kind of set-up is the homepage. This is because it acts as a gateway or hub for accessing all other content on your site. It’s often where the journey begins (and also where you should go if you get lost.)

Flat site architecture is a best practice approach that leads to optimal user experience leading to retention of membership accounts.

Definitely worth sticking to.

Explore: How To Use Information Architecture To Improve Your Knowledge Base

WordPress Members-Only Pages Examples

It’s always a good idea to look into real life examples. This will allow you to check your options and choose the right path ahead.

1. Barn2 Knowledge Base Example

Want a frontend example of how that would look?

Take this example from Barn2 Plugins, they’re a premium WordPress and WooCommerce plugin company.

The screenshot below is of their custom designed Plugins Knowledge Base for users (they used the Heroic Knowledge Base Plugin to achieve their result):

I’m sure you’d agree – an inviting set up.

No matter the context of your members-only area:

• online training courses
• client billing area
• family blog
• intranet for colleagues

…it’s obvious how a simple, yet effective, presentation like this would serve your site members (or subscribers) beautifully.

2. Smart Insights Members-Only Area Case Study

As with any practical exercise, building a members-only area is made much easier when we have an example to follow.

A solid standard to model might be the Smart Insights website.

If you don’t already know, Smart Insights is a leading online training provider for marketing professionals, led by the bestselling author Dr. Dave Chaffey.

Their training business serves 150,000 members who all gain their subscription value by accessing content via the Smart Insights ‘members-only’ web portal.

Their site is built using WordPress.

Not too long ago, Dr. Dave and his team radically upgraded their member’s area.

And in true content marketing authoritative style – blogged on their success story.

The article is called: What’s new in our upgraded members’ area? A guide to the 5 main new features.

To summaries the reason for their member-only area upheaval, Dr. Dave mentions his team was prompted to make the changes following…

“…frustrations with the UX (user experience), rather than about the content.”

In addition he reveals:

“Essentially, the issue was a findability issue stemming from a previous initiative…

…the main problem was that after finding a resource…

…the previous UX required them [members] to find the resource again within a grouping of the toolkit requiring multiple clicks.“

It seems the navigational flow of pages was making users work unnecessarily hard to find their answers. This obstructed the learning experience.

So what did they do?

They opted for a flatter (and more user friendly) site architecture.

Deep site architecture vs flat site architecture, Source: Adpearance

Want a front-end screenshot?

Look familiar?

Strikingly similar to the Barn2 Knowledge Base don’t you think?

A simple array of topic-based cards that mirrors the member’s need and links to the related content.

Very easy for the user. And partly because it’s so flat. Any content piece can be conveniently landed upon within a couple of clicks.

What this also proves is that regardless of the type of business, the same fundamental UX (user experience) principles apply to having success with your members-only area website.

But the case study doesn’t end there.

A highly valuable tip that Dr. Dave Chaffey revealed within the article which will massively increase your project ROI was user feedback.

He explains:

“Feedback from members has been the main driver for this change. We use many techniques and channels to get feedback and in all of these, we have had regular prompts from members suggesting a need to improve the usability of the members’ area.”

Sounds very reasonable that being user directed on design and architecture will deliver better results on member satisfaction.

But this begs the question:

“What were the tools and techniques used by Smart Insights to generate this valuable info?”

Dr. Dave lists them as:

• Contextual email marketing surveys
• Contextual feedback tool on pages (inc. voting)
• Customer feedback contact forms plugged into HelpScout

Admittedly, Dr. Dave reports the most effective channel for member feedback was the customer contact forms (which alone generate over 100 questions or comments each month).

The advantage for Smart Insights is unpicking the user experience ‘pain-points’.

This in turn increases their membership satisfaction, subscription retention and ROI.

You only have to multiply the benefit by 150,000 members and we can soon see why Dr. Dave and his team stress the importance of generating user feedback for their online training business.

Pro tip: Rapid content search ability

A quality search function does one better than great navigation.

Hence why Dr. Dave et al. invested in a new Algolia-powered search function in their members-only area.

Take a look:

This new improved search brings a customer order straight to the table.

Much like a ‘table service’ restaurant saves your legs having to run around collecting your dishes at a buffet counter…

.. search also does all the hard work by bringing your online members EXACTLY what they need – ON DEMAND.

And as we said before, enhanced information discovery enhances member engagement and customer satisfaction.

Method 1: Restricting Access to WordPress Pages, or Posts Without Any Plugin

By default you get controls to make any particular WordPress page or post:

1. Private: Only visible to site admins and editors
2. Password protected: Only visible to those who know the password

To follow along, edit a page or post that you want to make private (you can find all your pages from WordPress website dashboard).

1. On the top toolbar, on the right side you can find the post Setting icon. Click on it.
2. In the post settings
3. Click on the Status settings
4. Here you will find options to make a post private or password protected.

Method 2: Creating WordPress Members’ Only Area

We looked at how we can make pages or posts private. But how about making a specific directory or whole system private?

For examples:

• Knowledge base, or a support portal
• Courses section
• Download section

To achieve this we will need a plugin with membership features. Heroic Knowledge Base can be one the solution you are looking for.

With Heroic KB you can create a member only area to create an internal knowledge base, documentation, or create a specific directory that can be made private.

Here are the steps you need to follow:

Step 1: Create a Custom Directory With Heroic KB

We need a separate directory where we can block user access behind the login screen.

We are going to use the Heroic KB plugin to create a separate directory, as it also provides necessary functionality to lock that directory behind user login.

Heroic KB is a premium only plugin that you can purchase from the link below.

Once you have access to the plugin files:

• Download the Heroic KB plugin from your account dashboard.
• Install the plugin by uploading it in your WordPress website plugins section.

• Activate, and complete the setup wizard (this will import the demo site settings and content).

By default this will create a custom directory on your WordPress website at yourwebsite.com/knowledge-base/ location.

Based on your requirements, you can change everything from Heroic KB plugin settings.

• Default directory slug (from knowledge-base to something else)
• Content options
• Default heading texts, colors and so on.

Step 2: Restricting User Access to the Directory, Creating Members-Only Area

Now that we have a separate directory ready, it’s time to restrict users' access to it.

By default all users will be able to access it with a URL.

To restrict access:

1. Go to your Website dashboard → Heroic KB → Settings.
2. Click on the General Settings tab, and scroll down to find Restrict Access settings.
3. Set the Restrict Access setting to the ‘Logged In’.
4. Save the Changes.

Test it with and without logging in to check if it’s working as intended (I’m sure it’s working just fine if you followed steps correctly).

There you have it! Your very own members only area on your WordPress website.

Step 3: Add Your Content

You can skip this step if you know WordPress a little bit (like creating blog posts, categories, tags).

Heroic Knowledge Base articles are like WordPress Posts. And likewise, they come under the Categories umbrella. Plus, you can assign Tags to them.

To begin with, here’s how you produce an article:

Head over to the WordPress sidebar menu again, locating ‘Heroic KB’, under which you’ll find the sub-heading ‘Add New Article’.

Click that link and find a new article open in the editor:

In the same way in which you would create and publish a WordPress Post, do the same here.

There are some slight differences found in the Heroic KB Add New Article editor vs. the traditional WordPress Post editor, namely:

• Article Stats
• Article Attachments
• Voting Options
• Voting Feedback

But we’ll skip the details on this for now and address this within a later chapter called “Generate User Feedback”.

Assigning the newly published articles to Heroic KB Categories and Tags in the Add New Article editor works the same as with WordPress Posts.

Simply follow suit.

The great thing about how Heroic KB handles new content is that it:

• Immediately fills up the category buckets on the members’ area home page
• Selects posts to feature immediately in the ‘Popular Articles’ sidebar widget
• Adds new articles to the search results using the search bar

It’s an effortless process having it all link up together.

This leaves you to simply focus on adding new content without the distraction of endlessly tweaking plugin settings.

Job done.

Members-Only Area Best Practices

Considering you might be creating this type of system for end users(customers) and your business might depend on it.

Here are a few tips that will help you with your membership site.

1. WordPress Password Protected vs. Private Log-In Restriction

The simplest way to restrict access to a specific page (or other post content) is to use the default visibility settings that WordPress gives by default.

You can find these options on the right-hand panel wherever you add a new page or post:

Under the Visibility settings, there are 2 options to make your page (or post) password protected or private:

1. Password protected: Here, only the readers with the page’s (or post’s) password can unlock access to the content
2. Private: This option grants access to specific users based on their role

Let’s see how this work:

1. Password Protecting Pages/Posts

This is a very straightforward option giving you the ability to password protect individual pages and posts simply by assigning a password to that page (or post).

Anyone who knows the password(s) can access the content.

Now, this option works if you have a page or two that you’d like to hide from the general public.

However, you can imagine that if you have 100s of articles to protect, you’ll have to maintain and distribute 100s of passwords with all the eligible readers.

Another problem with this method is that if a user finds such content or clicks on a link to such a password protected page, they will see a screen asking for a password, so they’ll know that there’s some protected or exclusive content on your site.

So, if you don’t want the people who don’t have access to learn about this content, then this method won’t solve your purpose.

The following screenshot shows an example of a password protected resource:

Furthermore, password protecting a page doesn’t remove that page from the website if you don’t have permission to view it.

Instead, the word ‘Protected‘ is added to the beginning of the title, which does have its uses, but it's not ideal if you don’t want people to know there is private content on the website.

2. Marking Pages/Posts Private

Private Pages don’t require individual passwords for getting unlocked. Access to such pages is granted after checking a user’s role. Typically, only site admins or editors can view such private pages.

Here’s how a page marked private looks like:

The other big difference between password protected and private pages is that if you don’t have sufficient privileges to view a page, then it won’t display on the website anywhere.

This is especially useful if you don’t want the average website visitor to know there is additional content on the website.

Left: Private articles are completely hidden if you are not logged in or don’t have the correct permissions. Right: The same articles publicly available.

It’s clear:

Of the two options, only the Private visibility setting makes sense if you want to restrict a lot of content on your site.

But as you can tell, you can’t possibly give every user admin or editor level access on your site. Which means you need to introduce another membership level (subscribers).

And then set the private pages’ visibility level to that of subscribers. This way, all your subscribers will be able to access all the restricted content.

This is how you might go one step further and set a more sophisticated (but equally easy to assign and manage) restriction of access to members’ only content in your WordPress website.

2. Generate User Feedback Within the Members’ Only Area

User demand should be the driver for all content and service investment.

The Smart Insights case study earlier shows that successful large scale membership websites literally make decisions based on what users say.

Sure, you need an aggregate picture.

It’s not worth getting tied up in the knots of every user’s opinion, but getting a top-level estimation for what would add the most value is critical to staying on track with ROI.

Here’s how to collect user generated feedback within your WordPress member’s only area:

1. (Direct) Voting System
2. (Direct) Feedback Form
3. (Indirect) Search

And they can be split up into two types:

Direct User Feedback Generators

• Voting system: users vote for the content type as either helpful, or not
• Open feedback: free text form where users are encouraged to add detail to their vote

Indirect User Feedback Generators

• Search: users type a query into the search bar. Every user search query is recorded in the admin area for you to analyze.

Although quite different, based on whether the user ‘intended’ to communicate with you or not, the two types of feedback systems can be neatly integrated into your site.

Here’s how the systems work in detail:

Voting System

I’m sure you’ve seen this kind of system used by websites throughout your online experience:

An article voting system is a quick and non-pushy way of asking users and members to share their opinion on how the content was received.

Presumption kills excellence – and in service businesses, like members’ only websites, you cannot afford to guess whether content hits the mark. You’ve got to ask to be sure.

Here’s how to simply set up an article voting system using the Heroic Knowledge Base plugin.

It’s engineered to help you to identify demand for prioritizing your members’ area content production:

Voting With Heroic Knowledge Base Plugin

User feedback is made both easy and effortless – both for you and your members with the Heroic Knowledge Base plugin.

Voting is the quickest and most painless way of members giving you insight into their experience.

And for this reason, it is good practice to offer on every article the opportunity for members to give a thumbs up, or thumbs down.

Every member’s only article you publish via the plugin, by default has user voting included.

Keeping your content production workflow uninterrupted in the editor.

That said, you do have the option within the meta boxes in the article’s editor of switching voting off (or, ‘disable voting’).

Open Feedback

The opportunity for open-ended user feedback is offered to every voter. But not at first.

Getting good conversion rates of user feedback is a balance.

Neglecting a call to engagement (or making it ‘hard to find’ invite) simply leads to no feedback. Whereas pressurizing your members with what looks like hard work on their behalf, breeds avoidance.

So, the process of voting feedback eases in the user with a simple ‘thumbs up or down’ and then upon clicking either thumb symbol, a text box appears below asking ‘that little bit more’:

In the WordPress admin panel, the voting feedback is neatly aggregated by Heroic Knowledge Base plugin and summarized like this:

A simple gauge gives an overall score for your members’ only area. Plus you are presented with individual feedback in cards beneath – along with an ID of the article and comments.

Search

The most valuable and insightful source of actionable members’ area feedback should ALWAYS be ‘Search’.

As Google well knows, search is actually a mutually beneficial relationship.

Users benefit from instant answers to critical questions.

And the provider benefits from knowing what users want.

Tip: Where it really works is when providers act on what users want and ‘chase the (ever increasing) wave’ of demand.

This way providers always stay on top of relevance – and become the de facto choice and channel for users.

This is the key to success for your members’ only area.

Here’s how you do that within your WordPress website:

As mentioned earlier on, ‘Search’ is a default function in the Heroic Knowledge Base plugin.

And is one of the most popular features in such websites.

This is a member’s typical search journey…

Let’s say, a member has a question and types in a query into the LIVE search bar:

As the member types their query, LIVE search offers up a list of the most relevant articles by title and description.

If the member doesn’t select an article from the list, nor find any match in the results – this shows up:

‘No Results’.

The member then has the option of either:

(a) asking for help (‘Contact Support’), or;

(b) continuing their search elsewhere.

If a member opts to ‘Contact Support’, your benefit is that they tip you off for what information that they needed, which you did not have.

This is a heads up for what you could add to fill the gap in your members’ only area content.

Will this gap in your content turn paying members away?

Customer experience expert, Estaban Kolsky, claims:

Estaban also shares from experience that:

What response should you have to this?

Get proactive and fill in your content gaps.

And this is where the Heroic Knowledge Base plugin ‘search’ intelligence (aka. Analytics) helps.

A null search is when a user types in a search that ends up with a ‘No Results’ response from the LIVE search.

The system logs the search phrase and how many times users have queried this within a selected period e.g. Last 12 months.

The advantage for you, the publisher, is a user-generated, data-driven list of priority content topics that is instantly actionable.

Get filling in your content gap.

3. Help Desk Integration for Better Member Satisfaction

There are, of course, those occasions where (even with the best of intentions) – your content just doesn’t cut it.

Which is where customer support comes in.

Ultimately, even a low touch sales environment still needs even very limited hands-on help.

In such cases, customer support is the front line of your battle against member dissatisfaction and churn (cancellations).

According to customer service experience author and thought leader, Shep Hyken, 96.2% of customers will leave for bad customer service.

And being prompt in ‘letting members know instantly that they were heard’, counts massively in your favor.

This is why integrating your members’ only area with a solid help desk software is key to keeping members happy.

Here’s how to do that in WordPress:

Using the Heroic Inbox plugin it’s really simple to set-up a fully featured help desk software directly inside your WordPress admin area.

• No extra log-ins
• No opening up other tabs in your browser
• WordPress controlled access for all your support staff

3 steps is all you need:

And your inbox is LIVE within only minutes.

No sweat.

What does Heroic Inbox do to help you to achieve customer amazement?

Amongst many other things…

• Send and receive customer support emails right inside WordPress: reduces workflow friction, saving time, by allowing you to perform all of your customer support whilst in the WordPress back-end.
• Keep an auditable history of all support tickets: never risk getting customer support threads buried under ‘other’ emails by using this ‘ring-fenced’ ticketing system.
• Produce a CRM-like profile summary for every enquirer: equip your support staff with a CRM customer profile of every inquiring member.
• Assign requests to any number of registered support staff: there’s no limit to the number of registered support staff the system can cope with. And the system also supports staff collaboration on individual tickets.
• Line up auto responders: have canned responses to fill in for you on those replicable messages to smoothen out any kinks in response timing.

In addition to all of these, Heroic Inbox is available at a single one-off price. The cost savings against the nearest SaaS solution are huge, year-on-year.

WordPress Plugins to Create Members-Only Area

Here are some plugins that we highly recommend you to restrict WordPress pages or to create members only areas.

1. Heroic Knowledge Base

You already know this one if you followed the above tutorial. This is the plugin we will recommend to create private directories with WordPress.

Just don’t go for the name (knowledge base), it is way more capable than you think.

It will allow you to easily create:

1. Internal documentation
2. Internal directories or private content hubs
3. Internal Wikis

Any content system that you can think of locking behind login access.

2. bbPress

bbPress is a very good plugin if you are looking to create private communities.

In fact, we also have a guide where we showcased WordPress forum examples created with bbPress.

The functionality it offers is really outstanding considering it is a free plugin.

Additionally, use Easy Digital Downloads plugin to put your pages behind a paywall or membership.

Take Home Points

Restricting users' access to pages (or posts), or members only pages in WordPress needn’t be a stressful experience. Nor simply academic.

Members’ only areas should be highly engaging 2-way knowledge transfer environments.

Places where both members and providers learn better ways of working together.

The end results should be an ever-increasing depth and breadth of useful content that:

1. Has a flat site architecture for easy navigation
2. Is shaped by reliable, data-driven user feedback
3. Stands alone as a leading information resource in the marketplace

Using smart membership software with built in analytics, like Heroic Knowledge Base plugin for WordPress – literally puts actionable insights on a plate for your team.

By staying on trend with demand, your website will always remain relevant and will not be in want of loyal users.

Are you currently setting up a WordPress restricted access members’ only area?

Are you looking to change your members’ only area software?

Either way, we’d be interested to hear from you.

Leave a comment below.

The post How to Create a Members Only Pages in WordPress (For Free) first appeared on HeroThemes.

After all, every team needs documentation to share information, retain knowledge, stay focused on goals, and simplify long processes.

While there’s no one standard way to create all this documentation, the fundamentals remain the same.

Let's take a look at them to improve your documentation writing skills.

We rigorously test and research every product that we recommend through HeroThemes. Our review process. We may also earn a commission if you make a purchase through our links.

The State of Documentation Writing in 2026

Since the AI revolution Most brands are starting to use AI chat assistants to improve their customer experience on documentation.

It definitely helping with:

• Answering frequent questions and in a faster way
• Helping with the search
• Reducing customer tickets
• Personalizing the customer experience
• And of course, writing documentation

That said, you might wonder, “Can’t we just let ChatGPT write our docs?” Well, not so fast.

AI-generated text tends to be generic and lacks the nuanced context or opinionated clarity that human-written docs provide, which can easily backfire.

High-quality documentation requires deep understanding of context and thoughtful decisions—things AI struggles with.

Documentation is the process of figuring out what your users need and the best way to explain it. Skipping this step can result in content that doesn't actually help anyone.

The sweet spot is using AI as a helper, not a replacement.

What Is Documentation

Documentation is any material that explains or instructs. It can be text, images, even videos. Anything that helps someone understand something or get something done.

We often think of software manuals or developer docs, but documentation is everywhere in business:

• Marketing team has playbooks
• Support team has troubleshooting guides and FAQs
• Engineers have code comments and technical specs
• HR has process checklists
• Customers rely on user guides and knowledge base articles

The key point here is that documentation is a broad umbrella. If its information written down (or recorded) to help someone else do something or understand something, it counts as documentation.

Types of documentation you need to know before writing it

Since we're talking about writing documentation, I won't bore you with the different types, such as project documentation, technical documentation, and so on.

Instead, In his talk on the types of documentation, Daniele Procida or Divio AG categorizes documentation into four types:

• learning-oriented tutorials
• goal-oriented how-to guides
• understanding-oriented discussions
• information-oriented reference material

As you can understand from how he puts it, every piece of documentation has a different objective, and those responsible for the documentation must establish it each time they set out to create one.

Based on the different types of documentation shared above, you can create documentation that easily fulfills its objective.

• Knowledge base articles: Short how-to articles or FAQs on a help center. Great for customers seeking quick answers.
• User manuals and guides: Longer form documentation explaining features, often with screenshots and step-by-step instructions.
  Explore: Best User Manual Examples to Learn From
• Technical reference docs: Detailed info on APIs, SDKs, configuration, primarily for developers or IT professionals.
• Project documentation: Records of project plans, decisions, research, and progress (for internal team use).
• Process and policy manuals: Standard operating procedures, company policies, checklists for internal workflows that ensure consistency in how things are done.
• Code documentation: This includes inline code comments, README files in repositories, and auto-generated docs from code (like Javadoc or Swagger for APIs).
• Design docs and specs: Documents created during development to describe how a feature should work or how a system is designed.

From this you can easily guess how different types of documents should be written.

For example, user manuals would focus on goal-oriented, how-to guides, while design documents would focus on information-oriented reference material.

Why Good Documentation Is So Important (Benefits and Impact)

Good documentation pays off massively, often in ways that aren’t immediately obvious.

Below are some of the major benefits of quality documentation:

1. Saves Time and Money by Enabling Self-Service

Perhaps the most direct benefit is that documentation lets people help themselves instead of creating support tickets for every single query.

A knowledge base can easily answer the most common questions about your product or service, eliminating the need to reach out to a support agent.

This translates to real money: fewer support tickets mean lower support costs and faster response for the tickets that do come in.

2. Drives Product Adoption and Customer Success

When users understand your product better, they use it more and derive more value from it. If that’s the case, they’re more likely to stick around (higher retention) and even advocate for it.

Docs offer immediate value by showing people how to achieve something with your product, whereas marketing might just tell them about features.

3. Faster Onboarding and Training

Having solid documentation makes it much easier to bring new people up to speed.

For customers, a good “Getting Started Guide” can make the difference between them abandoning the trial versus becoming a power user.

New employees or developers joining a project can read the documentation to get context. Which is much better than tedious training sessions or bothering a teammate every 5 minutes with questions.

5. Fewer Errors and Faster Troubleshooting

When instructions are clear and knowledge is shared, people are less likely to do the wrong thing.

6. Consistency and Knowledge Preservation

People come and go, but documentation sticks around.

By writing things down, you decentralize knowledge and avoid single points of failure.

7. An Asset for Scale and Growth

Think long-term. If you ever want your project or product to scale, you personally cannot be the answer to every question.

Documentation is what allows you to grow beyond heroics and one-on-one hand-holding. It’s a force multiplier.

What Does Good Documentation Look Like?

In the past, we have reviewed hundreds of documentation examples, and even the best ones were missing something.

This is just a quick recap of it, I recommend that you check out the guide on the best documentation examples yourself.

1. Clarity and Simplicity: Good documentation speaks plain language. It’s as short as it can be while still being useful.
2. Know Your Audience (and Organize for Them): The best documentation is structured around the user’s needs and knowledge level. One size does not fit all.
3. Great Navigation and Search: Good docs are easy to navigate. Having a search bar, a logical hierarchy of topics, and a table of contents helps a lot.
4. Plenty of Examples and Visuals: Good documentation is concrete. It provides examples. These examples can be sample code, screenshots, or real-world scenarios.
5. Feedback Mechanisms: Documentation evolves based on user feedback. Without feedback, you're shooting arrows in the dark.
6. Comprehensiveness with Accessibility: Here comprehensive doesn’t mean writing a 500-page tome. It means covering the necessary ground so users don’t hit dead-ends.
7. Freshness (Up-to-date)

Here’s a concise table comparing the key qualities of Good vs. Bad Documentation:

How to Write Documentation That Truly Helps

We’ve covered a lot of ground to get you prepared for this step. Now, let’s cover some practical steps and mindset tips as you embark on writing documentation:

1. Decide What to Write

Because documentation can take so many forms, it’s essential to finalize a format before writing it.

For example, at HeroThemes, we use a mix of FAQs, installation tutorials, troubleshooting guides, lists of tips and tricks, and others for our customer-facing documentation. Most of our customers also use a similar composition.

Depending on the documentation you’re producing and for whom, you’ll need to know what all forms your documentation can take.

Jacob Kaplan-Moss talks in detail about these in What to write.

He explains how tutorials, topical guides, and reference material make up the bulk of documentation in most cases:

• Tutorials: Tutorials or how-tos are the most basic form of documentation. For our customer-facing documentation, tutorials are our how-to resources that our users use to add a knowledge base to their website with our plugin or populate it with articles.
• Topical guides: Topical guides tend to go a lot deeper than tutorials and cater to more specialized topics. For us, these are our guides on topics like translation and integrations. We loosely categorize these as advanced topics.
• Reference: In our customer-facing documentation context, this type has information on our integrations with our partners that our users might find helpful when setting up their integrations. Or links to any stuff they might find useful when implementing any of our HeroThemes solutions.

2. Start with an Outline

Just as you design a product (or work on a plan before starting a new project) before building it, design your documentation.

Jot down an outline or table of contents of what you plan to cover.

This helps ensure that you include all the necessary topics and organize them logically. It also serves as a skeletal structure to fill in.

To give you a better idea of what this looks like, here’s how most software README files are designed:

1. Quick product introduction
2. Glossary to explain complex terminology
3. Installation guide (Step-by-step)
4. Basic Usage (With some examples)
5. Frequently asked questions

Outlining also makes it easier to divide writing tasks among multiple contributors.

Here’s an outline template that I often use before writing any type of article or a guide.

3. Write in Small, Manageable Pieces

Tackle one article or section at a time. Perhaps start with a quick-start guide to help new users get started. Then expand into deeper reference material.

This incremental approach means you always have some useful docs even if the whole set isn’t complete yet.

4. Use a Conversational Tone (for appropriate audiences)

In general, I recommend using a friendly, conversational tone for user documentation and a straightforward, slightly more technical tone for developer documentation.

But never a robotic or patronizing tone.

Phrases like “now you’re ready to…”, “you might be wondering…” can make the text more engaging.

Being conversational also means anticipating questions.

5. Don’t Be Afraid to Show Personality (a Little)

If your brand voice allows, you can add small touches of personality, such as a light joke, an anecdote, or a tongue-in-cheek “Note:”

I once added a line in a troubleshooting doc: “If all else fails, try turning it off and on again—no, really 🙃.” Surprisingly, we got feedback that it made the doc more approachable.

Of course, use humor or personality sparingly and appropriately. The goal isn’t to entertain, but to make the experience less drudgerous.

6. Keep Paragraphs and Sentences Short

This is a simple writing hack for readability. Aim for paragraphs of 2-5 sentences.

In technical writing, clarity trumps literary flair. It’s perfectly fine to have a one-sentence paragraph if it contains a key point.

Also, use formatting to break things up:

• Bullet lists (like this one!)
• Numbered steps for procedures
• Tables for structured information

7. Make it Scannable

Most readers scan before they commit to reading.

• Use clear headings and subheadings that signal what each section is about
• Use bold text to highlight important terms or keywords
• Use call-out blocks for tips/warnings

A scannable doc means even if the user doesn’t read every word, they can still extract the steps or info they need by glancing.

8. Review and Test Your Docs

Reviewing is an essential part of the documentation process. It helps you ensure that your documentation actually works.

In his five-step documentation reviewing process, technical writer Tom Johnson says that the first stage is unmissable where you — the documentation writer — make “the product work” for yourself following the steps you’ve written.

Take the time to follow your own instructions as if you’re the user. This is the only way to catch missing steps or assumptions.

If possible, also do a peer review: another person (ideally similar profile to your intended reader) goes through it and gives feedback. They’ll point out confusing bits or typos you overlooked.

9. Set an Update Schedule

Documentation starts stalling as soon as it’s published. So you need an update schedule.

Your update frequency will depend on the documentation you’re looking at. For instance, your user-facing documentation will need updates only when you update your product.

Developer-facing documentation, and technical code documentation is forever ongoing (inline documentation).

Your internal work documentation, on the other hand, could use updating each time something changes.

For example, when you replace your current project management tool or even when you simply discover a more optimized way of doing some work. Tribal knowledge capturing and general knowledge capturing are some of the ongoing exercises in such documentation.

When it makes sense, maintain a change log in your documentation so that users don’t feel lost when they see an updated version.

Also, as part of updating your documentation, get rid of the obsolete and duplicate files. A search in your documentation should never return multiple versions of the same support content. Each topic should only take one resource.

10. Use Metrics to Improve

Use analytics to identify content gaps in your documentation and improve its overall quality.

• If an article has a high “no” in helpfulness, rework it.
• If certain search terms are trending, maybe create an article for that.
• If a forum thread or support ticket pattern emerges on a topic not covered in docs, document it.

Over time, your documentation becomes more robust and self-correcting through these feedback loops.

Remember, outdated docs can be worse than no docs, because they mislead.

Additionally, here are some writing tips to help improve the quality of your content:

Choose the Right Tools and Software for Documentation

Writing documentation isn’t just about the content; it’s also about where that content lives and how it’s delivered.

The tools or platform you use can make documentation easier to produce and more useful to consume.

Heroic Knowledge Base

If you’re documenting a product for end-users or customers, a knowledge base is ideal.

These are usually web-based portals with search, categories, and article pages.

A great option here is Heroic Knowledge Base. A plugin that lets you create a full-featured knowledge base site on WordPress.

Key Features:

• Easy to setup with built-in setup wizard
• Freedom with article layouts and customization
• Instant search suggestions
• Article feedback system, reports, and analytics
• ChatGPT based AI virtual assistant
• Fully customizable portal
• Content restriction feature to create internal knowledge base

There are also tons of other helpful features.

The best thing about the Heroic Knowledge Base is that it’s very affordable. The base plan starts at just $67 per year!

Furthermore, I recommend checking out the guide on the 13 best technical writing tools and software.

Wrapping it up

Documentation writing is a craft and an ongoing journey. What you write today will evolve tomorrow, and that's exactly how it should be.

Start with a solid foundation using the principles and practices we discussed.

Over time, iterate and improve.

Stay attuned to your readers and the shifting context of your product or project. When you adapt your writing to meet real user needs, your documentation remains a living resource that informs, guides, and delights.

The post How to Write Documentation: A Comprehensive Guide for 2026 first appeared on HeroThemes.

Here’s why:

One of the heaviest hidden operational costs of businesses, large or small, is the loss of productivity from inefficient knowledge sharing.

In fact, a cutting edge study canvassing a cohort of 1,000 U.S. knowledge workers (entitled the Workplace Knowledge and Productivity Report produced by Panopto¹) revealed that:

“…42 percent of institutional knowledge is unique to the individual.”

In other words, almost half of the knowledge that an employee discovers, finds, researches, produces, augments etc. will be irrecoverably lost if (and when) that employee leaves.

Not only does this figure pose a tangible loss in strategically valuable institutional knowledge, but coupled with the following estimation that:

“…U.S. knowledge workers waste 5.3 hours every week either waiting for vital information from their colleagues or working to recreate existing institutional knowledge.”

The potential ROI recovery on every worker’s time saved in waiting on a fellow co-worker’s response or ‘reinventing the wheel’ on existing knowledge is huge.

For a team of say 50, this would amount to over 250 hours of productivity per week, for example. In real monetary terms, this saving alone would be worth the equivalent of one week’s salary for 6 full-time employees.

Suffice to say, as mentioned up top, there is a substantial business case for building an internal wiki for staff use.

When weighed up, the relatively moderate investment of designing and implementing an internal wiki versus the potential losses in productivity is 

We rigorously test and research every product that we recommend through HeroThemes. Our review process. We may also earn a commission if you make a purchase through our links.

What is an internal wiki?

An internal wiki is a site designed to be used as a tool for staff members of an organisation or business only. 

The purpose of an internal wiki is to act as a convenient digital storehouse of information intended strictly ‘for staff use only’, and delivered as a network of shared posts or articles interlinked together according to topic.

WIkis are both collaborative and living. In other words, the content is produced collaboratively and continuously re-edited and improved according to purpose.

Think Wikipedia, but for internal company information only.

Advantages of using an internal wiki for your project

Wikis facilitate collaborative learning. This is where the shared input of from the most informed to the least informed make a contributive effort to scripting the institutional knowledge base.

In the context of your business or organisation, a wiki will act as an internal driver for continued professional development.

Your people learn. Grow in stature and then teach. And wiki catches it all.

A stimulant for internal knowledge acquisition and sharing.

The wiki grows from a seed eventually into a forest resulting from the steady labour of contributors, underpinned by their like-minded inquisition and pursuit of understanding. 

The varied source of authorship leads to a diversity of voices and styles. But if well governed, the result (much like Wikipedia) is a knowledge repository of great value and shaped with real integrity. 

Asynchronous in nature, a wiki does away with the distraction of shoulder tapping in the office by building a prescribed body of knowledge as the first port of call.

Wikis tend to have high adoption/use rates, largely because they breed a sense of ownership within the user base. The people who utilize the information also produce it. A kind of “for us, by us” mentality. Therefore there is a natural inclination and self-investment that isn’t present with a non-contributing readership.

Wiki’s are an effective organizational learning tool with tangible ROI if used correctly.

Best practice features of an internal wiki

What’s the standard for a Wiki?

The first of its kind, WikiWikiWeb was developed by Ward Cunningham on 16, March 1995. 

Nicknamed after a Hawaiian airport shuttle bus called the Wiki Wiki Shuttle (‘wiki’ meaning quick in the native Hawaiian tongue), the original tagline of this first ever wiki software was “the simplest online database that could possibly work”.

In essence, it was a content management system by which teams of people could rapidly deploy and scale web-based informational databases.

Today, there are many, many wiki software (called wiki ‘engines’) for getting the job done. But most notable is MediaWiki, the engine which powers Wikipedia itself (along with tens of thousands of other sites from around the world).

Typical uses for wikis are encyclopedias or company knowledge bases. But either way, wikis are becoming essential reference material in a growing number of social or commercial learning contexts.

Here is a shortlist of distinguishing features that are common among wikis:

Hypertext – in simplest language, this is a web-based text document (perhaps also including graphics, audio or video) which contains hyperlinks to other texts. 

It is widely accepted that hypertext was first conceptualized by Ted Nelson in 1965 as a form of non-sequential writing. A type of computerized memory extension formatted according to the pattern “As we may think”.

Collaborative – collaborative writing capability for multi-authorship projects. The ability to host large cohorts of writers who share drafting and editing responsibilities for the project.

Markup – whether HTML or CSS, for example, wikis allow editors to program the text pages with markup changes. This helps to develop custom web pages that include features like <a href> tags for hyperlinking between texts or <strong> tags for emboldening text, making for a far more enriching user learning experience.

Rich text editor – this function helps add dimension to an otherwise flat text document. Also known as a ‘what you see is what you get (wysiwyg)’ editor, plain texts are enriched by images, audio and video media with text decoration like italics etc. 

These above points are the staple features possessed by wiki engines. 

Another way to look at it is that software programs which have the above functions also can be used for the purpose of building a wiki.

As long as the raw ingredients are there, then it’s possible to both build and grow your very own wiki.

Ongoing requirements for maintaining a well organized internal wiki

A wiki is a living document. Its contents keep multiplying organically. The more it gets used, the more it grows.

In fact, the scope of your wiki should be a direct fruit of your team’s daily hunger and thirst to know more.

The day your wiki stops growing, is the day your team loses appetite. (Perish the thought).

Much like any project, maintaining a wiki needs governance. For quality of content, for uniformity of format and topical relevance in particular. This all calls for keen supervision.

But what are the key items to look out for when drafting a wiki maintenance plan?

Here are a few pointers from those in the know:

Joseph Boone, “Former US Army IT communications specialist” with over 10 years experience as an IT analyst and communications expert contributed the following to helpdeskgeek.com:

• Usability and readability testing: your internal wiki is supposed to actively serve the purpose of being an informative destination of choice for your team. Like any resource, the more useful it is and in the case of a text document ‘readable’ it is – the better it will serve. Your return on investment relies on it being easy to get value from as a user.
• Established policy guide: there’s a reason why general housekeeping rules are given upfront. For the members of the house to remain functional, they need an orderly environment. And to keep an orderly environment you need to set some boundaries, routines and an agenda. Running a useful wiki is the same.
• Critical curation: perhaps contrary to the contemporary educational theory supporting collaborative learning, a successfully run wiki actually needs governance. Cutting away the fruitless branches and purging the underperforming ones will only give rise to better all-round yield.
• Promoting and acknowledging power users:  the lifeblood of a wiki is the user contribution. You have a vested interest in encouraging those who are inclined to give. The more they contribute, the more your wiki grows. The more it grows, the better it satisfies users. The better the user satisfaction, the greater the value. The more it is valued, the more persuaded non-contributors are to get involved. Reward your contributors.

An internal Wiki example

There’s no better example wiki than the gold standard itself, Wikipedia. 

Sure, it’s anything BUT an internal wiki – but that said it does serve as a solid gold standard of how a wiki should be done.

Here are some stats:

• Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history.
• one of the 15 most popular websites ranked by Alexa; 
• more than 58 million articles
• attracting around 2 billion unique device visits per month
• more than 17 million edits per month (1.9 edits per second) as of November 2020

(Source)

For the sake of having a working example benchmark of success, Wikipedia fits the bill.

Much to examine and learn from for building your own internal wiki.

As far as highlights are concerned, here is a list of our favorite operational snippets from the Wikipedia site:

Home Page

The above image is from the homepage of Wikipedia.

There are 2 main features to note here:

1. Main content
2. Sidebar content

The main content is a compendium of the current or latest news, changes and topics. A fitting entry-point for a wiki project.

Essentially, it’s a splash page that informs the community of the latest buzz and absorbs the focus of the target audience with hyperlinks out.

Contributors introduction

For those unconverted readers, this is a simple introduction of how contributing works and helps them decide if it is for them.

A page essentially inviting readers to begin their journey as a contributor to your wiki.

Social Networking

This page is the social communications hub for the wiki. It’s really a messaging platform that allows users to share ideas, ask questions and stay connected with one another.

Subject index 

An anchor page for all main category links. This serves as an index which is only one click away from the home/main page providing access to any page resource via its corresponding head category.

Category archive page

This category archive template has a category pages index appearing just before the page content. This index of links is followed by an introductory paragraph describing the contents of the category.

Article page

The classic wiki article page template. A simple H1 heading, followed by a category link and then the main article content, including a featured image and table of collapsible contents.

Article editor

Editing content in Wikipedia is made simple by this proprietary editing tool. Its capabilities straddle both visual editing and markup language. Only logged in members can fulfill editing duties in this case.

Article revision history

Each article has a revision history which is disclosed to all members detailing exactly how much work has been put into producing the ‘as-is’/current version.

This suffices as an audit trail of activity for each post.

Owner’s welcome and request

Every community project needs the support of its users. Without such contributions the project would simply run out of steam. A wiki by definition is tethered by the same constraints. Therefore a key role of every wiki project lead is to stir up continued and increasing support for the project to maintain its momentum.

Self-service help

This is a knowledge base style self help portal within the wiki which serves the purpose of ironing out the administrative creases encountered by contributors.

Explore: How To Build A Self Service Website

Onboarding

The onboarding landing page. If newcomers have any questions about how to get started and use the platform – this is the resource which answers all of those early stage questions.

Forum

This is a forum which backs the wiki users with a discussion board for airing out their opinions, performing Q&A, resolving disputes and solving technical problems.

PDF Download

Wikipedia offers every visitor the opportunity of downloading each article as a PDF document. A simple ‘download’ button will land a pristine PDF version of the article they are reading on the desktop of their device.

Explore: How to Embed PDFs in WordPress Website

Wiki analytics

A convenient dashboard with all of the headline performance statistics of the wiki informing you of which articles do well and which ones don’t. Great for identifying the content gaps and areas of improvement.

Building an internal Wiki using WordPress

As mentioned earlier, every wiki needs a wiki engine.

Whilst Mediawiki has earned all the early attention by launching its flagship, Wikipedia, there have since entered other solutions into the wiki engine marketplace that are worthy of consideration.

Some are direct competitors in the wiki engine niche and others are substitutes with cross over competencies.

One such able competitor with oodles of transferable wiki appeal is WordPress CMS.

WordPress lines up as a multi-talented Swiss Army Knife solution within the CMS field.

Traditionally recognized as a personal blogging platform, WordPress actually possesses a very apt and stable core CMS functionality and beyond this is even perhaps THE MOST versatile web builder out there.

In the realm of CMS software, there just isn’t anything even close to the dominance of WordPress right now.

Want proof?

43% of all websites on the internet use WordPress, and we also reviewed other content management systems for the documentation.

Blogs, online courses, knowledge bases – WordPress has so many faces. And its $500+Billion ecosystem is flooded with custom add ons and plugins that extend its already expansive reach into specialist areas of operation…including WordPress wiki plugins. 

But the question is, what is the ideal array of WordPress ingredients to produce the ideal wiki engine recipe?

Here’s our recommended blend for building an internal wiki using WordPress:

Wiki engine: the functional foundation of your WordPress wiki engine. This is the framework for pulling all of the content together and aligning articles according to categories automatically hyperlinked together in silos, ready-made for your convenience.

Use Heroic Knowledge Base plugin to convert your WordPress into a fully fledged wiki engine.

FAQs: easily accessible answers to frequently asked questions will extend the informational value of articles lending enrichment to context and application of main page content. 

Use Heroic FAQs plugin to build modular blocks of FAQ related knowledge into wiki pages, quickly and easily.

Explore: Best FAQ Templates: For Pages and Sections

Social messaging: enable internal team messaging via your wiki app to encourage collaboration and influence member contributions. 

Use the BuddyPress plugin to allocate restricted access to certain collaborative functions in your WordPress self-service portal.

Password protected content: make certain functions and areas within the wiki accessible to only a select few with password protection.

Revision edit tracking: stay transparent with editing activity on your wiki site by displaying a revision edit audit trail – complete with named staff resources responsible for each tweak to content.

Use this snippet to include revision tracking on every article in your WordPress internal wiki.

Wiki user forum: a virtual bulletin board for wiki users and contributors alike. This forum will join together various threads of query and conversation for the purpose of keeping all members on the same page.

Use BBPress to instantly add a multi-featured web forum to your WordPress wiki.

Advanced search configuration: a LIVE search surfaces search results speedily and presents them immediately at the users fingertips before committing them to follow a hyperlink. 

Use Heroic Knowledge Base plugin to equip your WordPress wiki with LIVE search function.

Citations: references add stacks of educational value to wikis. Footnote citations are a neat method of including reference links within the body of your articles.

Use CM Footnotes to insert citations easily within articles and posts.

Voting and feedback: field feedback from your wiki users in situ and use their submissions to prioritize your content improvement drive. 

Use Heroic Knowledge Base plugin to enable up voting and down voting on each article. Also, with a feedback form users can add free text comments to further add value with detailed constructive criticism.

Monitoring, analysis and improvement: keep track of user experience metrics to guage overall performance and usability of your wiki. This will ensure you maintain a ‘fit for purpose’ resource that is genuinely worth its keep.

Use Heroic Knowledge Base plugin to analyze your user journey and stay abreast of where to score your quick wins.

Print My Blog: give users the convenience of being able to instantly download a PDF version of any article.

Use the Print My Blog plugin to install a robust solution for instant PDF conversion of your wiki pages.

Conclusion

And that’s how a wiki WordPress style is done.

The best part is none of those 3rd-party plugins require code or advanced level tweaking. At most, with the code snippet for revision history it’s a cut and paste job. Nothing more.

A very convenient solution for WordPress beginners and old hats alike.

And now, over to you…

Are you ready to give setting up your own WordPress internal wiki a try?

Have you already tried building an internal WordPress wiki?

Either way we’d be interested to hear from you.

Leave a comment below.

Resources

1. Inefficient Knowledge Sharing Costs Large Businesses $47 Million Per Year – by prnewswire ↩︎

The post How To Create a Wiki Using WordPress (Complete Guide) first appeared on HeroThemes.

It’s the only evidence-based route to determining exactly how your audience values your website’s content.

But like many other scientific disciplines, UX is a cumulative effect.

In other words, its benefits are seen as an end result (or the total sum) of very many tiny clues picked up along the way.

And therefore one of the most critical functions within the UX workflow is recording.

According to scientific sensibility, UX researchers are avid record takers.

As the theories they come up with are potentially gold, but until tried in the fires of a series of practical trials, those ‘hunches’ are unproven and pending valuation.

If, once tried, a UX theory is proven by a cause and effect related positive impact on ROI – then, what was an assumption should be banked in the forefront of institutional memory as proven fact.

Any theory that is otherwise, would be archived in the back office stores and used perhaps occasionally for the value of lessons learned.

Whilst this conventional wisdom might well be embraced and seldom challenged by marketing professionals and web scientists, the question remains…

”How do you build a UX research repository?”

With so many software applications to choose from and approaches to information architecture to adopt – the eventual answer is up for debate.

However, certain principles remain golden.

• Web-based
• Device responsive
• Reliable
• Secure
• Content management
• Scalable
• Flat site structure
• Hierarchical categorisation
• Collaborative authorship

These system features enable UX teams and web marketing specialists the ease of use and peace of mind to do what they do best.

A common expert recommendation for such a software would be a content management system (CMS).

Purely for the fact that, by definition, that class of solution is purpose built to tick the majority of the boxes in the checklist above.

And so, if expert opinion of a CMS would be pursued, you’d find none better in the current online economy than WordPress.

WordPress CMS currently powers over 46% of all websites online and is a proven champion in the content management stakes.

Used by some of the most prestigious names in industry for various applications including internal knowledge bases – WordPress is in our opinion the most robust, yet flexible UX repository solution.

Plus, with a thriving plugin economy, WordPress also floats a boatload of features and specialist functions for customising a winning UX…for your UX team’s data repository.

Here’s a table of contents to our guide on how to build a UX repository using WordPress:

We rigorously test and research every product that we recommend through HeroThemes. Our review process. We may also earn a commission if you make a purchase through our links.

What is a research repository?

A UX (User experience) research repository is a digital reference library used by UX professionals for both storing and retrieving findings and supporting materials for enhancing their projects’ user satisfaction.

Said simpler UX pros will use a repository to plan and track research.

On any UX project, you might have numerous contributors and as well as repository users – even interdepartmental – which makes more sophisticated demands of a repository software.

A UX research repository has two main themes of content:

• Raw data (input) – the stuff that fuels thought and is the substance of investigation
• Assimilated intelligence (output) – the intellectual constructs that are devised through analytically processing the raw data

UX researchers are the primary contributors to a research repository. Their works are often the inspiration which their colleagues in allied marketing disciplines draw on to validate their decision-making.

Here’s a schematic of what those duties and their related products look like:

Each of these areas of competency seeds a variety of data outputs which are made available to the organization via the repository.

Benefits of an UX research repository

Institutional data begins with the individual.

But if that’s also where it ends, the result is critical institutional memory loss.

“…if past project owners are the only source of results, you risk losing valuable institutional memory when these individuals leave the company or get reassigned.” (Jakob Nielsen, Nielsen Norman Group as quoted by Dovetail)

The actual valuation of cost due to institutional memory loss is arguable.

But within the ‘knowledge economy’ where internal intelligence is the valued commodity to be traded – organizations who experience staff shake up, are losing mission critical matter.

Unforgivable, in a word.

Data types in UX

So, it’s imperative that a front foot approach to knowledge retention and sharing is implemented in advance of any calamity or collapse.

Let’s begin by identifying the various types of UX departmental data that a repository could hold:

• Infrastructural: the typical org charts, SOPs and other organisational framework related documents
• Research: strategy, planning, requests for research from other departments.
• Data and Insights: reports, snippets, sightings, recordings, transcriptions, raw notes, artifacts – anything containing and conveying actual subjective observations or reasonings.
• Analysis: proprietary outputs from 3rd party software systems, exported into shareable file format like CSV or Text, for example.
• Contacts: panel or participant details, useful for follow-up

Centralized vs distributed UX data

Where institutions don’t have a coordinated, centralized database for collating research findings and references, there are drawbacks.

One team member might use Google Drive, whilst another Dropbox. Naming conventions for file labelling, file types etc. are according as the individual chooses.

Sharing distributed data involves a patchwork quilt of collaborative practice that produces workflow friction through lost time leapfrogging various platforms etc.

A centralized data repository on the other hand, brings all an institution’s data under one roof, giving the following benefits:

1. Data integrity

Users interface with a single system and are led by instruction to uphold particular data handling protocol.

A far more cohesive design.

This in turn helps to produce a standardized quality and arrangement of data for all stakeholders involved.

In other words, better data integrity.

2. Stronger ROI

The strength of a team is their uniformity.

A single database aligns organizational focus.

This in turn facilitates strategic singleness of thought and efforts, which will only improve return on investment.

With a clear view on the strategic importance of a single source UX research repository, let’s take a detailed examination of the common parts…

Components of a UX research repository

UX repositories are specialized software programs.

The final implementation should arise from a feature rich platform, but shaped by deft customizations to deliver a solution that really fits the purpose and practice of the team using it.

Features

That said, there are commonly found ‘features’ (some more obvious than others) which perform the necessary functions that are required for most repository use.

Such features act as stepping stones which lead a system user closer to their desired data.

Design

And dovetailing functionality within the repository solution is design.

Visual constructs that determine how the front end presentation handles and enhances the professionals’ ability to find the most suitable data item to satisfy what they need.

An example front-end UX research repository:

Here’s an example front end of what a fully featured UX repository might look like:

Plain, but mapped out in logical trickle-down, hierarchical order with ‘swim lane’ division of function and content.

Nielsen Norman Group, who authored this wireframe example, didn’t have to reinvent the wheel though.

When looking at this set-up you probably saw a striking resemblance to an ecommerce site layout:

• Search: Wide
• Select: Narrow
• Filter: Narrow still
• Findings: “Got it!”

Just take a look at Amazon for confirmation of the theory:

1. Search

2. Category Selection

3. Filter Products

4. Results

If it works for Amazon, why change it?

This is the simple overview.

However, if we only dig just a little deeper, we get to see how all system features compliment one another beautifully to the overall benefit of enhancing the performance of the UX research repository.

Easily accessible: firstly, user access is key. If users cannot access a system, no matter what the merits, you’ve already lost.

With organizational use, you’ll want to consider: restricted or protected files or pages, custom views etc.

Also, device responsiveness – as the system might be accessed via various screen sizes and dimensions.

Portable data: exporting and importing data is a key compatibility issue with knowledge based systems.

So having a repository that can competently handle such transfers is critical to avoiding having your data marooned somewhere remote and unusable to staff on location.

Meta data and tags: detailed data tagging helps give pieces of submitted data identity within the sea of information.

Ascribing meaningful character to information will help the specificity of your UX repository search and find.

Input form: the cornerstone of the puzzle, if you don’t put reliable, well-formatted data in – how do you expect to get it out?

An easily customizable input form that streamlines the data upload process for input users will only serve to encourage use and keep data standards high.

Search: …and now for the front end. With repositories, we always begin with search. This is the widest funnel entry point.

A kind of ‘ask me anything (AMA)’ approach that feeds off the individuals needs and allows them to voice their request without constraint.

LIVE search helps further by dynamically presenting the nearest matches as a dropdown display that hangs from the bar real time.

User feedback: as seen within the Amazon example above, integrating user feedback is a common feature in most ecommerce sites. Now, a UX repository has quite a different objective compared with ecommerce…or, does it?…

Feedback is used by merchants to credibly and objectively recommend the product in question. This has been seen to increase sales conversion.

Can such a practice in a UX research repository lead to increase user conversions?

Why not?

Analytics: a UX professional should never have to be sold on the value of user observation.

An in-built analytics engine would add serious commercial value to a UX research repository.

Flat site architecture: immediacy is a key factor in the enhancement of software system use.

The longer the wait, the greater the friction for the user.

And flat site architecture, again commonly used by ecommerce vendors to get customers to the product ASAP, is a leading method is assisting the quickest route to finding and discovering data.

Hierarchical categories: a checklist of the main categories of data to select from allows system users to leap into a theme and get immersed themselves.

This is useful for the occasions where users are not looking for anything in particular but are willing to browse their way through material to enrich their own knowledge base.

Related content links: cross-linking relevant data points is a valuable feature within any data repository or knowledge base.

It helps to join dots that otherwise wouldn’t have been associated or might have been overlooked at first pass.

And that concludes the UX repository components.

Now, how would you go about building one of these?

Building a UX research repository with WordPress

You need a platform.

A wider framework software that has the in-built toolkit off the shelf without coding that immediately get your project off the ground.

In the case of a content heavy web project like a UX research repository, the ideal instrument of choice is a content management system (CMS).

And among the world’s best CMS software, WordPress is the most popular (over 60% market share) and with a hugely successful ecosystem of 3rd party plugins

It’s a robust, easy to use content management system with multiuser capabilities.

Ideal for a collaborative UX research project.

Explore: Best CMS for Documentation and Knowledge Base

Here are some best practice UX repository software features – complete with solutions of how they can be achieved using WordPress:

1. Hierchical category architecture and index root page
2. Web forms
3. Workflow automation
4. Display posts
5. Faceted, filtered search

Hierchical information architecture: instantly set-up a category based data index of UX research submissions. A flat site architecture to offer the most accessible arrangement of content for users – enhancing deliverability and inability.

Use the Heroic Knowledge Base plugin to simply deliver a branched, index-like presentation for your UX repository. With the home page as the root, allow users the benefit of browsing content at a glance to the optimizing of user satisfaction.

Explore: How to Improve Knowledge Base Information Architecture

Web forms: build feature rich, admin enhancing web forms for managing data input and upload to the repository. Add permission based rules to a distributed team of authors, plus include advanced features like conditional logic for streamlining use.

Use the Gravity Forms plugin to produce advanced web forms capable of customizing your user upload and submission experience.

Workflow automation: support your article submission process with automated rules to gate approval or rejection. Integrate web form submissions with back-office automation controlled by emails to moderators to add authorship quality control.

Use the Gravity Flow plugin to systematize your web form submission approval with ease. A custom extension for the Gravity Forms software, this add-on will help you coordinate first class UX research submissions – every time.

Explore: How to Automate Customer Service Tasks

Faceted filtered search: implement a highly granular search experience for your users, enabling them to query the repository with varying degrees of specificity.

Use the Facet WP plugin to simply convert any WordPress generated post list into a fully faceted and filterable search experience.

User feedback: collate user ratings and open-ended feedback for UX research articles offering insight to improvements. Highlight particularly useful submissions with recommendations and upvotes.

Use the Heroic Knowledge Base plugin with its in-built user voting system and conditional feedback form for a non-invasive method of picking up on popular user opinion.

LIVE Search & Analytics: head-off your repository functionality with a LIVE search bar to draw out of users their desired results. Monitor search input for deep user insights and to validate content improvements.

Use the Heroic Knowledge Base plugin with in-built LIVE search bar to bring the most suitable entries to the user’s fingertips before they hit the return button.

Customer support: set-up a shared administrative inbox for fielding any user enquiries and/or participant support tickets.

Use the Heroic Inbox plugin to drop in a collaborative inbox directly into your WordPress dashboard, removing the need for switching browser tabs to move between website and email client.

Take home points

WordPress is an obvious choice for developing a UX research repository.

It’s free (open source), is a content management system that can be configured for collaboration and tailored to perform many custom functions.

The plugins recommended above enable you to quickly (and without code) deliver a repository much like the Nielsen Norman Group example – and with all the robust reassurances of an enterprise solution.

It’s malleable, easy and fun to use and can be scaled to meet the demand of a growing solution.

Follow the steps above to get started today.

The post UX Research Repository: What It Is, Examples & How To Create first appeared on HeroThemes.

Accordions help make websites easier to explore and improves user experience. They also help reduce clutter and shorten extra-long web pages.

In this step-by-step guide, we show you how to make an accordion section on your website without having to write a single line of code.

A great thing about using WordPress is you get to add amazing features such as accordions to your website using a simple plugin. In this guide, we use Heroic FAQs to create an accordion section with just a few clicks.

We’ll walk you through the process, step by step. Let’s get started!

We rigorously test and research every product that we recommend through HeroThemes. Our review process. We may also earn a commission if you make a purchase through our links.

Create Frequently Asked Questions Sections - The Easy Way!

Build an FAQ and help answer common visitor questions.

Get the Plugin

What Is An Accordion?

Accordions are a very useful design strategy used in web design to organize multiple sections of content in a single place. Simply put, accordions allow you to create a section with collapsible tabs on your page designs to pack lots of content into one section.

For example, if you’re making a frequently asked questions (FAQs) section you can use an accordion to neatly organize the questions and answers. This way you can show only the questions and hide the answers in a collapsible accordion. It will allow you to save space on the page design and offer an easier way for users to explore answers.

Here's how accordion work:

Back in the day, websites also used horizontally tabbed accordions. But they are rarely used in website designs today.

Difference Between Accordion vs Toggle

Most people often confuse accordions with toggles. Even though they look similar, they have different behavior.

For example, when a user clicks on a heading on an accordion, it views the content in its tab. But when they click on another heading, the previous tab closes to view the new tab.

With toggles, you can modify this behavior to make the tabs stay opened. And allow users to close tabs manually.

In short, accordions only keep one tab open at a time. Toggles can be adjusted to view multiple tabs opened at a time.

You don’t have to worry about these two options because the plugin we’re using to setup accordions in WordPress supports both these options.

Why Use An Accordion?

There are many benefits to using accordions. Here are just a few reasons to use them on your website.

Save Lots Of Space

Have you ever visited a long webpage that forces you to keep scrolling down forever to find the content you’re looking for? Thankfully, accordions solve this problem.

The main benefit of using accordions is the ability to save space on your website. Instead of making extra-long pages you can hide all the important information behind tabs. And let users find questions and answers by skimming the headings.

Better Content Organization

Accordions also allow you to organize content in a user-friendly structure. With accordions, you can nest tabs to organize content under categories and topics. You can see this in action on the Tesco FAQs page we showed you earlier.

Explore: 7 Best FAQ Templates: For Pages and Sections

Embed Anywhere

Accordions can be embedded anywhere on your website. For example, you can add FAQs accordion sections on your pricing page or a product landing page. This will allow you to answer common questions about your product without taking up too much space.

Reduce Page Size

The size of your web pages plays a key role in a website’s page loading speed. As you know, page loading speed is one of the main ranking factors used by Google.

When using accordions in WordPress websites, you can drastically improve your website page loading speed since they can be embedded as a widget.

How To Add An Accordion in WordPress

For this tutorial, we’re using Heroic FAQs WordPress plugin. Not just because it’s built by our own team of experienced developers. Mainly because it’s a plugin that comes with lots of features. And provides lots of value than other plugins.

Using Heroic FAQs plugin, you can build unique FAQs and knowledge sections for your website as well.

Now, let’s get to the hands-on tutorial.

Step 1: Download And Install Heroic FAQs

First, you’ll need to download and install the Heroic FAQs plugin on your WordPress website. Once you’ve purchased the plugin, you’ll be able to download it from your Heroic account dashboard.

Then, login to your WordPress admin dashboard. Go to Plugins >> Add New page and select Upload option. Browse your computer to find the downloaded ZIP file containing the Heroic FAQs plugin and Install it.

After completing the installation, be sure to activate your plugin using your license key.

Step 2: Create A FAQ Group

Heroic FAQs plugin will then guide you through your initial setup process. Simply follow its instructions.

Get started by creating a FAQ group. This is where all your FAQs will be grouped and organized.

Then you can start adding FAQs to this group. These can be either questions and answers. Or details about product features. Or anything you want.

Remember, you can add as many FAQs as you want.

Step 3: Embed The Accordion

Now you can embed your FAQ group on a page or a post. With the new Gutenberg block editor, it’s much easier to add accordions with Heroic FAQs.

Create a new page or edit an existing one. Add a New Block and search for the Heroic FAQ content block.

From the Heroic FAQ block panel on the left side, you can select the FAQ group you want to show on the page. As well as change the style of the accordion design.

Step 4: Switch Between Accordion And Toggle

With Heroic FAQs, you can choose between accordion and toggle options with a single click.

Step 5: Preview The Accordion

Preview the page to see how the accordion looks like. Then you can hit Publish to save the changes.

How To Add An Accordion in WordPress for Free

To add an accordion (or toggle at least) in WordPress you don't need to install any plugin.

WordPress has a built-in block called “Details” that allows you to create an accordion-like (toggle) content. Design it with custom CSS and you have a block a to create FAQs with.

There are also many free WordPress accordion plugins available. However, functionality and customization will be limited compared to Heroic FAQ, and accordion functionality can come at the cost of bloated pages and low page speed scores.

So, choose the right solution!

In Conclusion

There are many different ways you can leverage accordions to boost user engagement and provide more value to customers. Use our guide as a stepping stone to finding your own unique approaches to using accordions in other useful ways.

In the meantime, feel free to browse our blog for more tips. You’ll find our best knowledge base software comparison quite helpful.

The post How To Add an Accordion in WordPress (Step-By-Step Guide) first appeared on HeroThemes.

In this guide, I will teach you how to create a WordPress knowledge base that looks and works exactly like the demo below.

Explore the live WordPress knowledge base demo here.

Just install a plugin → import demo → start publishing your knowledge base articles.

That's how easy this tutorial will be. Let's start!

What Is a Knowledge Base?

A knowledge base is a centralized repository of information used to collect, organize, and share knowledge about a specific subject, organization, product, or service.

In most cases, it's used to provide customer support through a self-service portal, and to centralize company resources (such as company policies and procedures, SOPs, training materials, product information, tools).

We have explored more about knowledge base through our in-depth guide if you would like to learn more.

Is WordPress Good for a Knowledge Base?

We rigorously test and research every product that we recommend through HeroThemes. Our review process. We may also earn a commission if you make a purchase through our links.

With a knowledge base you are looking to solve customer issues, you need a simple yet powerful solution. You definitely don’t want to spend internal development time on something that can be easily created with web tools.

Using WordPress for your knowledge base will help you serve customers better in the long run. WordPress offers the flexibility to be used with any type of web development environment and to be extended with any type of functionality.

We created the KnowAll theme and the powerful Heroic Knowledge Base (Heroic KB) plugin to reduce the burden from our customer care and improve customer service.

Since its initial release, Heroic KB has undergone hundreds of quality-of-life changes. We can say it’s one of the most advanced and proven plugin for building a knowledge base with WordPress.

Here are some of the key features you will get with Heroic KB or any knowledge base system should have:

• Code-free environment: With WordPress and Heroic KB, you don't need to have any coding knowledge. Drag-n-drop blocks (or widgets), check boxes, or options to build your knowledge base.
• Analytics or reports: Arguably one of the most important features a knowledge base system should have. With analytics you can discover what your visitors are looking for. Such as popular or failed searches and top articles.
• Custom templates or customization options: Like landing pages or blog posts, knowledge base articles should also provide the best user experience. Heroic KB comes with a clean knowledge base template by default and provides plenty of customization options. So you can design it based on your brand style.
• Powerful search bar: The first thing customers gonna do after visiting a knowledge base portal is to use the search bar.
  Search bar can improve user experience in many ways. For example, you can have a search bar that shows results as users start searching, reducing guess work. (Guide to WordPress Search Plugins)
• Chatbot integration: Not all documents are gonna solve users' queries, so you need to provide other options in such cases. An AI chatbot can be the answer here compared to a regular chatbots.
  Heroic AI Assistant provides an efficient way to deploy a custom chatbot trained on your knowledge base. If it’s unable to resolve customer queries, it will direct customers to human support.
• SEO optimization: Not all users will visit your website to search for. In some cases, users will directly search using Google or other search engines to find relevant guides.
• User feedback: User feedback matters the most. It gives you valuable insights on whether your guides are helpful or not. It can also be used to direct users to human support when the knowledge base is unable to resolve their issues.

WordPress Vs SaaS-Based Knowledge Base System

Most companies choose WordPress over a SaaS-based knowledge base system because of the complete ownership of the data, the integrations, the cost-effectiveness, and the customizability.

How To Create a WordPress Knowledge Base

Step 1: Install the Heroic Knowledge Base Plugin

Install the Heroic KB plugin through your website dashboard:

1. Go to your WordPress Dashboard by adding “/wp-admin” to the end of your website URL.
2. Hover or click on the Plugins → Add New Plugin.
3. Click on the Upload Plugin button.
4. Choose a downloaded Heroic KB plugin .zip file.
5. Click the Install Now button.
6. After installation, just click on the Activate Plugin button.

That’s it, you are done with the plugin installation step.

Step 2: Complete the Knowledge Base Setup Assistant

The Heroic Knowledge Base plugin comes with a Setup Assistant. You can be up and running in as little as 5 minutes.

By default, you will be taken to the setup assistant screen when you activate the Heroic HB plugin. If you have closed this screen for some reason, you can always access it from the Plugins section.

To complete the knowledge base setup wizard:

1. You will be asked to Activate your Heroic KB plugin with a license key.
2. Click on the Continue button.
3. You will be asked to install sample content, necessary and optional plugins at step 3. You can also skip here, but I suggest creating a replica of the demo knowledge base site, and get rid of the content later.
4. You are now done with the setup process.

Note: You can get the license key from the Downloads section of your account.

You can find a knowledge base demo installed on yourdomain.com/knowledge-base/.

At this stage your knowledge base is ready with all the necessary functionality and design, focused on providing the best user experience.

You are more than ready to start publishing knowledge base articles.

Step 3: Publish Your First Knowledge Base Article

To publish your first article, go to WordPress Dashboard → Heroic KB → Add New Article.

There, you can write your help article using the familiar WordPress editor, with a few additions.

On the right side, you can add:

• Categories
• Tags

Both of these taxonomies are specific to your knowledge base and won’t affect your other content.

And in meta boxes below the text editor, you can configure:

• Article file attachments
• User feedback voting options

Once you are done with the editing, you can publish it by simply clicking the Publish button.

Note

Since we installed sample content with the Heroic Setup Assistant, you may want to get rid of it after some exploration.

To do that, head over to:

1. WordPress Dashboard → Heroic KB → All Articles.
2. Select all articles by ticking the checkbox from the header.
3. Click on the Bulk Actions → Move to Trash.

Step 4: Customize Your Knowledge Base

Heroic KB plugin creates a clean template by default, but you have all the necessary options to customize it as per your needs.

You can access the Heroic KB settings panel by going to WordPress dashboard → Heroic KB → Settings.

Let’s cover some useful scenarios:

1. How To Change the Knowledge Base Slug or Directory Path

Let's say you want to change your knowledge base directory path from /knowledge-base/ to /docs/.

To do this, head over to:

1. WordPress Dashboard → Heroic KB → Settings.
2. Click on General settings and scroll down to access Slugs settings.
3. In the Slugs settings, update the KB Article Slug with your desired directory path. You can also update the category and tag slugs the same way.
4. Click on Save Changes, and you are done!

Note: If the path changes are not reflected, you can simply visit WordPress Dashboard → Settings → Permalinks, and just click on Save Changes button to update the overall settings.

2. Adding AI Chatbot

AI is booming everywhere since the release of ChatGPT, and it's definitely proving to be useful in serving customers better. As long as customers have easy access to connect with real people.

Having a chatbot trained on your knowledge base certainly sounds existing and useful! And it is.

Heroic KB provides an easy way to add an OpenAI based chatbot to your website with its AI Help Assistant feature.

To get started with AI Help Assistant, head over to WordPress Dashboard → Heroic KB → Settings → Help Assistant.

Hare you can configure an AI chatbot. Follow our guide to set up the Heroic AI Help Assistant.

3. Rearrange the Categories And/or Articles

You might want to rearrange the categories and/or articles though. To do that, go to either:

• Heroic KB → Article Ordering
• Heroic KB → Category Ordering

And rearrange the articles as needed using drag and drop editor:

4. Adding or Updating Knowledge Base Sidebar Widgets

The Heroic KB plugin includes a number of custom widgets and options to enhance the knowledge base sidebar.

To edit the knowledge base sidebar, go to WordPress Dashboard → Appearance → Widgets.

Here you can customize sidebars of knowledge base article, home, categories and tags as per your liking.

Other than the things mentioned above, here's some of the things you can do with Heroic KB WordPress Knowledgebase:

• Restrict access to your knowledge base (learn how to create a internal knowledge base)
• Change how many columns/articles display on your archive page
• Set up a transfer URL to send visitors to your human support solution
• Update colors and container width
• Enable or disable feedback, sidebar, email reports, comments, author bio, or related articles
• Integrate with Slack, HelpScout, and form plugins
• Add custom CSS styling

Step 5: Optimize Your Knowledge Base

It’s important to make sure your knowledge base is helpful at solving customer issues and reducing overall tickets.

Especially when you create a knowledge base for software, which changes a lot.

If your actual knowledge base content isn’t helpful to visitors, it doesn’t matter how many features your knowledge base solution has – it’s still not going to be a great experience.

To help you create better knowledge base content, we’ve written a number of articles that we think are pretty useful. We encourage you to give them a read as you build out your WordPress knowledge base:

• A knowledge base article template
• 5 Effective Knowledge Base Examples to Learn From
• Optimizing your knowledge base for SEO

With content, you should also look at analytics and user feedback. Heroic KB provides some built-in features for analytics and collecting user feedback.

Such as:

• Helpful or unhelpful feedback on articles
• Popular or failed searches
• Transfers to human support

These insights can help you identify where you need to improve your knowledge base and products.

How To Create a Free Knowledge Base With WordPress

WordPress has some really good options for creating a knowledge base. There are also free knowledge base plugins that you can use.

To create a free knowledge base with a WordPress:

1. Search for a free knowledge base plugin in the WordPress plugins directory.
2. Install and activate the plugin.
3. Test it out.

Free knowledge base plugins can help you create a basic, responsive knowledge base. And it can also includes some basic features to help you further flesh out your knowledge base.

But, with a free options you will be missing on important features or have a limited access to certain things:

• Limitation on number of knowledge base articles
• Article feedback from users: There’s no option for visitors to vote on how helpful an article is.
• Analytics: There’s no way to track searches and see which queries you need to provide content for.
• File attachments: There’s no option to attach downloadable files to your articles.
• Live support transfer: There’s no dedicated solution to transfer visitors to human support (or track which articles cause that to happen).
• AI Chatbot
• Third-party integrations
• Glossary and FAQ builder
• Little to no support

Investing in premium plugins like Heroic KB will not only help you create a better knowledge base system, but it will also help you retain customers and increase sales as well.

Final Thoughts

We used to neglect starting tutorials or onboarding processes, only to get confused and end up searching for a solution online.

The knowledge base is much more useful than we think. Not just for customers, but businesses as well.

WordPress offers a powerful plugin like Heroic KB to create and manage a knowledge base.

So get out there and create a customer-helping, support-reducing knowledge base with WordPress!

Let us know if something isn't working, we will gladly help! 😊

The post How To Create a WordPress Knowledge Base — Step-By-Step Guide first appeared on HeroThemes.

With the current array of self-service tools available, it has become quite easy to create a self-service portal within hours.

And that's what we are going to learn from this guide: building self-service portal that improves customer experience and help you scale your support efforts.

Let's start.

We rigorously test and research every product that we recommend through HeroThemes. Our review process. We may also earn a commission if you make a purchase through our links.

What Is a Self-Service Portal?

A self-service portal is a website (or part of a website) that provides support assistance that would otherwise be provided by the service staff.

It offers quick resolutions to many common user problems with only a few clicks.

A self-service portal typically contain:

• Knowledge base articles and FAQs
• Ticket submission and tracking system
• User account management (profile updates, password resets, preferences)
• Billing and subscription information
• Downloadable resources like manuals, forms, or software updates
• Chatbot or virtual assistant
• Announcements and updates

Advantages of Providing a Self-Service Portal to Your Users

Self-explanatory resources eliminate the time it takes the support desk to establish first contact.

Customers benefit from a well-crafted solution to their problem or an answer to a relatively simple question.

If done well, self-service portals present major economic benefits compared to staff only support functions.

Here are the main advantages of offering a self-service portal to your users:

1. 24/7 availability
2. Faster resolution time
3. Reduced support workload
4. Improved user satisfaction
5. Consistent answers
6. Cost savings
7. Scalable support

Which Organizations Typically Benefit From Providing Self-Service Portals?

Organizations with thinly spread labor resources benefit most from self-service portals.

Why?

They potentially have the most to lose.

Where efforts are stretched, it doesn’t take much strain or load to cause support staff to drop the ball.

And even the most popular businesses can’t afford too many slips before there’s a slide on customer confidence.

These are some typical scenarios in which self-service portals not only impact profits the most, but also make possible operations that were otherwise not feasible:

1. Solopreneur or Small Businesses

The most common scenario here is one person responsible for multiple disciplines.

Many one-person enterprises find themselves pulled in every direction without gaining traction.

The frustrations that arise from a daily routine cluttered with repetitive, low-value communications quickly build up.

In this situation, pre-made self-service material can work wonders in liberating business owners so they can spend more time driving the business forward than spinning plates.

2. Corporate Enterprise

All corporations want to grow. However, there are drawbacks to increasing scale. And some of these threaten to destabilize the entire business.

When customers lose interest in a product or service, they either request a refund, or simply walk away – never to return.

This tends to happen most often when customer success teams are overwhelmed.

They simply cannot handle the number of requests they receive.

Customers have super long waiting periods before being contacted and lose confidence.

For big business, this is bad news.

It’s either time to slow down, or perhaps even time to trial that self-service portal idea.

3. Not for Profit

Cost efficiencies are critical to the sustainability of nonprofit organizations.

Exceeding budgets can lead to financial instability and quickly threaten an organization's integrity.

A self-service portal with an extensive selection of pre-written responses to the most common questions could provide two benefits:

• Increasing support capacity
• Decreasing support staff overhead

This would be an invaluable effect for any nonprofit.

4. Governmental Agencies

The government must answer to millions of people, so a self-service become the most viable solution here.

Just imaging, you are responsible for creating citizen IDs, and every day, you answer the same question about required documents hundreds of times.

That would drive anyone insane.

Just adding that to the board will help you stay sane and complete the task at hand.

A Self-Service Portal Example

To help you get to grips with an on-the-ground example of what a self-service portal could do for your project, I’ve selected this example.

The example comes from Lowe’s, the US-based home improvement retail giant.

Here are some stats surrounding the case:

• Lowe’s is a Fortune 50 company with more than 2,355 retail stores, distribution facilities, and corporate offices located in the US, Canada, and Mexico
• Employs nearly 285,000 full and part-time employees, and serves approximately 17 million retail and professional customers each week.

The numbers speak for themselves and present a frightful support challenge…even for a Fortune 50 company. And obviously there were few problems.

Problems with Lowe's Customer Service:

1. Disjointed Knowledge Islands

No single-source database for support workers to draw from. This led to isolated pockets of knowledge that would have better served customers being in a common location.

2. Unnecessary Rework

Lots of duplication. Valuable support staff time was being poured out ‘re-inventing the wheel in most cases’.

This was sapping the team performance as so much strength was being used to do stuff that had already been done. Wasteful.

3. Knowledge Was Not Treated as an Asset

In the case of Lowe’s IT support team, the corporate culture lacked an appreciation of knowledge assets.

The solutions and help that team members either wrote down or recorded was never gathered up and stored anywhere. So, such knowledge had a one time use only.

It’s the equivalent of taking a washing machine and after you used it once, you threw it away. (An expensive and terribly wasteful habit.)

How They Solved Their Problems?

1. Drafting Candidate Knowledge

Extensive efforts were allocated to drafting knowledge in large amounts.

In other words, they began actively producing knowledge assets.

And not retrospectively either. This would only have added yet more administrative burden to an already frazzled support team.

So to make things efficient and avoid yet further duplication, real-time knowledge creation was supported with an app.

2. Collaboration Rules and Processes

As knowledge assets began to accumulate, it quickly became clear that single authorship would limit the scope and scale of content (knowledge) production.

In order to maintain asset quality, some standard operating procedures for knowledge collaboration had to be established.

These instructions would guide collaborating authors to deliver value according to best practice.

3. Replacement of Old Knowledge Base

The existing knowledge base software was stand-alone and inflexible. Not only was it difficult to use but also lacked the interoperability or more modern solutions.

4. KB and Incident Management (Ticketing) System Integration

Previously, there was no efficient way to link a customer query that reached the help desk with a knowledge base entry that could answer it.

The new knowledge base being fully integrated with the ticketing system enabled support team members to shoot off knowledge base links to customers almost instantly.

5. Incentivized Knowledge Creation

Support staff began receiving official recognition and commendation from management for creating and contributing to the database. This gave them a personally rewarding reason to “grow the know.”

6. Real-time Knowledge Creation

The company's knowledge base grows with each new ticket.

When a customer contacts your support team about an issue, it will potentially be repeated by another customer.

Capturing this information and making it available to customers is essential.

7. Cultivating – An Intensive, Invasive and Dedicated Process of Change

The cultural DNA had to change. The way things were done and what people innately respected needed shifting.

Management worked tirelessly and cautiously to bring about the adjustment successfully.

Key Features of Self Service Portal Software

The Lowe’s case study above gives a few clues:

1. Knowledge Base

Your self-service portal requires a central data repository (a knowledge base). This will help you avoid the disjointed knowledge islands mentioned above.

That said, the job of data management and storage is anything but 1 dimensional.

I.e. getting data into a system is one thing, but getting out meaningful information is another thing entirely.

To achieve the latter, a user-friendly interface that assists discoverability and findability is key. A system that delivers accurate results, quickly is always a winner.

Software like the Heroic Knowledge Base provides the necessary functionality:

• Advanced search bar
• Easy, but flexible article builder
• Categorization and tags
• Multiple layouts
• Feedback system, analytics and regular reports
• Simple useful UI by default

2. Collaborative Authorship

Multiple authorship needs to work simply with a system like this.

• Enterprise-wide access
• Version control
• Edit tracking
• Comments
• Internal team messaging

These are all features that make the collaborative function a success.

3. Integrated Ticketing System

One of the big wins experienced by the Lowe’s IT team in our case study above was having a ticketing system that was closely related to the knowledge base.

A leading cause of reduction in the 1st call contact in many support case examples is the accessibility of knowledge base snippets for support staff on the front line.

Being able to search for, find and share appropriate knowledge base assets whilst dealing with LIVE queries is a massive time saver and budget economizer.

Building a Self-Service Portal

Now, having a good idea of what a self-service portal should look like in theory, let’s take a look at the practical approach.

There are tons of options to build a self-service portal (basically a website), and from those options WordPress stands at the top with its content management flexibility.

Here’s our recommended route to building a self-service portal using WordPress:

Step 1: Creating Knowledge Base

Knowledge base is a central repository that houses and organizes all your content intuitively and automatically. With customizable styling, this knowledge base is the perfect mix of function and branded aesthetic.

Use Heroic Knowledge Base plugin to convert your WordPress into a fully featured, knowledge base with bells and whistles.

1.1. Access Restricted Access (for Internal Use)

If you want to create an internal knowledge base for your employees, you can do so by updating the settings in the Heroic Knowledge Base.

To do that:

Access WordPress dashboard > Heroic KB > Settings > In General Settings > Restrict Access setting.

1.2. Approval/Rejection Editorial Control

The knowledge base created with WordPress and Heroic KB is highly flexible. It basically allows you to control who can access, edit, or publish your website content.

This is necessary when multiple people are working on a single system.

To manage your self-service portal access:

Access WordPress dashboard > Users.

Here, you can create new users or manage existing ones. Assign roles such as Administrator, Editor, or Subscriber to grant different levels of access.

1.3. Categorizing and Tagging

Keep your content siloed and hierarchically organized. Make it easier for user to associate knowledge assets most appropriately with in-built categorizing and tagging.

The Heroic Knowledge Base plugin allows you to categorize articles using the Categories and Tags features when creating an article.

1.4. Voting and Feedback

One of the most important feature of the self-service portal. Article voting or a feedback system.

Guess what? Heroic KB has this functionality too, so just update it from the settings page.

This system allows users to vote up or down on each knowledge base article and leave feedback.

Giving you the clarity needed to improve your knowledge base.

1.5. Monitoring, Analysis and Improvement

An analytical approach to assessing user satisfaction will reveal areas of strength and weakness within your knowledge of the database.

Access your knowledge base analytic from Heroic KB > Analytics.

That's with creating knowledge base. Let's move to step 2.

Step 2: Create an Ai-Powered Chatbot

Now that our knowledge base is ready, it's time to upgrade it with an AI chatbot to improve your customers' experience.

The AI chatbot will fetch data from your knowledge base and use it to provide human-like answers to customer questions.

If you created a knowledge base with Heroic Knowledge Base, then adding an AI chatbot to your self-service portal only requires updating a few settings.

Move to the Heroic KB settings > Help Assistant.

Here, You will find all the necessary settings here to create your AI-powered chatbot within minutes.

Explore: The 11 Best WordPress AI Chatbot Plugins

Step 3: Set Up a Shared Inbox

This is optional step.

Create a shared inbox to easily manage support tickets and collaborate with team members.

Use the Heroic Inbox plugin to add this functionality to your WordPress website.

Heroic Inbox is a WordPress plugin that enhances your dashboard with a shared inbox.

The core features include:

• Shared inbox
• Unlimited members and tickets
• Collaborative features. Like notes, reply drafts, and ticket assignments.
• Workflow automation
• Collision detection
• Saved replies or templates
• Ticket history
• User signatures

The best part? It only costs $79 a year!

Just compare that with a SaaS helpdesk software, and it costs 10x less. 🤯

Final Thoughts

So there we have it.

A step-by-step walk through the features and benefits of a self-service portal, as well as a guide for building one.

It's undoubtedly a major efficiency driver for organizations with heavy support overhead.

A self-service portal is a profitable solution in many ways, not just in terms of cost savings.

It provides better response times to issues and increased customer satisfaction, which leads to more sales revenue through extended customer lifetime value (CLTV).

Therefore, whether you are a micro-business, a corporation, or a nonprofit, a self-service portal has significant ROI potential.

And WordPress just so happens to be the ideal Swiss army knife tool for getting the job done.

So, why not start your project today?

The post How to Build a Self-Service Portal (Step-By-Step Guide) first appeared on HeroThemes.

In other words: they're “how-tos.”

They list the exact steps your resources can take to complete a task like onboarding an employee or releasing a product update or resolving a support ticket.

We rigorously test and research every product that we recommend through HeroThemes. Our review process. We may also earn a commission if you make a purchase through our links.

Benefits of SOPs

Above everything else, SOPs standardize (quality) work.

They enforce a consistent way of working. If you have a standard operating procedure for handling support tickets, all your support resources will perform exactly the same way, offering coherent support experiences.

SOPs also reinforce the best way of working as they present only the no-fail and optimized practices to get the work done.

They support easy knowledge-sharing as well by giving their users everything they need to complete their tasks from start to finish.

They double up as training material, too, helping new hires and employees get up to speed.

SOPs can come in many formats as operations vary greatly for different businesses… but, in general, they have a three-part structure.

How to Choose an SOP Format

Selecting the right Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) format is crucial for effectively communicating processes within a company or organization. The format you choose should be based on the target audience's needs and the level of detail required. Here are three commonly used formats to consider when creating your SOP document:

Simple SOP Format

A simple SOP format is ideal for providing an easy-to-read overview of key steps in a process. This format is best suited for straightforward procedures with limited variations. A simple SOP typically consists of three to four sections, which may include:

• Purpose: Explain the objective of the procedure and its importance within the organization.
• Scope: Define the range of applicability, specifying which departments, positions, or situations the SOP pertains to.
• Procedure: Break down the process into sequential steps, ensuring that each action is clearly defined and easy to follow.
• Documentation and Records: Detail any necessary record-keeping or documentation requirements, such as logs, forms, or reports.

Flowchart SOP Format

A flowchart SOP is an excellent solution for processes with multiple potential outcomes or decision points. This format visually maps the process, guiding employees through each step and its possible results. The flowchart format is particularly useful for operations that require precise and consistent outcomes, as it helps to eliminate confusion and reduce errors. A well-designed flowchart SOP should:

• Clearly represent each step in the process with symbols or graphics.
• Indicate the sequence of steps and decision points with arrows or connecting lines.
• Provide clear instructions for each decision point
• and guide employees toward the appropriate next step based on the outcome.
• Include any necessary supplementary information, such as reference documents, resources, or safety precautions, to ensure a comprehensive understanding of the process.

Hierarchical SOP Format

The hierarchical format is best suited for large, complex, or technical SOPs. This format organizes information into easily digestible sections using tables, headings, and subheadings. When employing a hierarchical SOP format, be sure to:

• Include an overview or table of contents at the beginning of the document to help users navigate through the sections.
• Organize the procedures into logical sections, grouping related steps or tasks together for better comprehension.
• Use consistent numbering and formatting for headings and subheadings to maintain a clear structure.
• Provide detailed instructions for each step in the process, including any necessary specifications, measurements, or tools.
• Highlight critical points or safety concerns using bold text, italics, or other visual cues to draw attention to important information.

In conclusion, the SOP format you choose should be based on the nature of the process, the target audience's requirements, and the desired level of detail. Whether you opt for a simple, flowchart, or hierarchical format, ensure that your is clear, concise, and easy to follow. By doing so, you can improve efficiency, reduce errors, and maintain consistent results across your organization.

The three-part structure of a standard operating procedure

Most standard operating procedures will come with at least these three parts:

• The first part describing the standard operating procedure.
• The second part being the actual “body” of the SOP — or the instructions. 
• And the third part offering all the reference material (like attachments, notes, etc.) that might be useful to the SOP user.

So let's see how you can write a good, concise standard operating procedure that your resources actually use.

Writing the first part of your standard operating procedures

The first part of a standard operating procedure is its title page and lists several of its details. Here are the steps you need to follow to get this section right.

Write a clear header for your standard operating procedure.

Your SOP's header can have as much or as little information as you need.

Most SOPs will use a header that has, at the very least:

• A descriptive title of the SOP 
• The name of the owner and reviewer
• The name of the person/role who it's meant for (the “user”)

It should also have additional details like:

• When the SOP should be used
• The access level/tools needed to carry out the SOP
• Any warning or caution messages

Some businesses also stick a revision history right inside the header or title page of a standard operating procedure. But this can be listed in the last section too.

This standard operating procedure's template (from Ironstone) uses a great header: 

Write the purpose of your standard operating procedure.

The purpose of your standard operating procedure tells the user what the SOP is about.

For example, the purpose of a standard operating procedure about handling a support ticket can simply be:

This procedure details how to handle an incoming ticket and track it to a resolution (or escalate, if needed).

Write your standard operating procedure's scope.

Your SOP's scope outlines where it starts and ends.

For instance, the scope of a support ticket handling standard operating procedure could be:

This procedure applies to all the incoming tickets that are flagged under the category “Refund.”  

A process like customer support or service can have dozens of SOPs to cover its different tasks. So it should be clear where a SOP's scope ends and the scope of another begins.  

Note the roles/team members who need to follow — or are involved with — the SOP.

List all the people (roles) who are responsible for following and maintaining the SOP.

For a helpdesk ticket handling SOP, the roles involved could be anyone from the agent receiving the ticket to the customer success or experience manager who might get involved in the case of escalations.

Put together all the quick reference material that supports your standard operating procedure.

List any definitions, abbreviations, or acronyms that you use across your business — standard or non-standard — on your SOP.

For example, if you use the term “code red” to mark an “angry” ticket that will result in, say, a PayPal dispute, explain the term in your SOP's glossary.

Write the “body” of your standard operating procedures

These are your instructions to complete the procedure's intended task.

It's best to get this section written by a person who does the work. For instance, if you're documenting how basic help desk resolution happens at your business, get a tier 1 customer service executive to write it. Because this person responds to several such issues a day, they'll naturally write a good SOP.

Note that this is “work.” And it's time-consuming too. So it will impact your support's bandwidth. 

Also, writing SOPs needs technical writing skills, so not all of your employees will get it right. They'd know what the process is, but they might not get how to document it. To go about this, get a freelance technical writer onboard or learn how to create a technical documentation.

One tip to keep in mind here is to write the SOP while actually doing the procedure, so that even your first draft will be decent.

In addition to the steps to do that result in a task's completion, note and address any known exceptions.

For example:

Step X: Forward the ticket to a tier 2 agent. 

Note: If you get an out-of-office message, forward the ticket to the support manager. 

The point is to address the unexpected outcomes too.

Write the final part of your standard operating procedures 

The last section of your SOPs is reserved for reference material.

It links to material that the person handling the SOP can use for additional help or for simply executing the SOP.

These could be links to internal knowledge base articles, checklists, forms, contact information, etc.

Contingencies and corrective action content also go here.

Testing for completeness and accuracy

The best way to ensure that your SOPs are complete and accurate and can be trusted to get the desired outcome (task completions) is to test them.

So once you write a standard operating procedure, hand it to someone (other than the writer) to implement it. They must complete the task using only the provided document (the SOP!).

You can also hire a specialist for a one-off job where the only support they get from you is your SOP.

Get the tester to note all the points where they feel lost or get stuck when implementing the SOP. These could be signs of unclear instruction or missing information.

You'll have to fix all these.

Rolling out your standard operating procedures

Once your SOPs are ready, it's time to roll them out because even the best SOPs are useless unless followed.

It's generally challenging to get your experienced employees to follow SOPs as they know the stuff they do. To sell new SOPs to them, highlight how following them will free them from remembering all the small stuff.

At a deeper level, though, you'll have to devise ways to make adherence to SOPs a part of your company culture.

Optimizing for performance

SOPs are rarely a “once-and-done” process, because things change.

A new legislation might add a few steps to your SOP. Changing a tech solution from your stack might need a set of updates to the procedure. Running into unexpected results can force you to go back to your SOP and add additional steps or fix the missteps as needed.

You get the idea.

In short: Your SOPs are “living, breathing” docs that need updating. So run maintenance checks on your SOPs from time to time and keep updating. 

One tip to write the most thorough SOPs

The whole idea of a SOP is to be the most COMPLETE document on how to complete an operation. But capturing everything that's needed to complete an operation is easier said than done. 

Giles Johnston, author of Effective SOPs and a consultant who works with businesses helping them design optimized SOPs, gives a word of caution against writing rushed-up standard operating procedures: 

“I joke with my clients that you have step one, then some magic happens, and you have step two. In reality, there may be 15 steps across a process that you need to capture.“

Wrapping it up… 

Documenting the standard operating procedures that power your core business processes ensures that your team always has guaranteed-to-work ways of going about their daily operations.

They know exactly what to do and what comes next. In addition to higher productivity and consistent performance, SOPs also help avoid all the avoidable errors.

So start now — just create a Google Doc and write your first SOP. You can also use this template to get a head start.

How can HeroThemes help you with creating and rolling out SOPs?
Essentially, SOPs are tools for internal company-wide knowledge sharing. With KnowAll , our knowledge base solution that powers internal knowledge bases for hundreds of businesses, you can easily create a “registry” of your SOPs and share with your entire team.

The post How To Write Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) — Step-By-Step Guide first appeared on HeroThemes.

Because documents make a big part of a company's documentation and knowledge-sharing mix, struggling to find them results in tangible productivity losses — about 4.5 hours a week!

Now, you have quite a few options for creating a digital document library to solve this issue. You have full-blown document library solutions like Sharepoint (a popular choice with Microsoft users). You also have your Google Drive. And, of course, options like Box and Dropbox work just fine, too.

The problem here, though, is that your documents end up being everywhere, making searching difficult. Plus, all your employees need accounts on all these solutions for seamless access. So when they're working on something and need a document to complete it, they need to visit a service to fetch it.

We rigorously test and research every product that we recommend through HeroThemes. Our review process. We may also earn a commission if you make a purchase through our links.

The solution? Building a WordPress document library

A good solution to this document management challenge is adding a document library right to your WordPress website, so all your website's members — your employees — can access the docs they need quickly in one single place.

A WordPress document library doesn't just help you share documents internally within your company but also publicly with your customers.  

So let's see how you can create a WordPress document library and bring all the documents that your employees and customers use straight to your WordPress website. Think of this as creating a light-weight WordPress-based documentation management system.

Step #1: Build a structure for your WordPress digital library

To create the most complete and usable document library that hosts all the documents it should, you need a solid structure. This structure tells you which documents you need and where each belongs (so your library doesn't end up being a digital document dump).

To go about this, think in terms of the different categories your documents belong to. For example:

• Job templates, drafts for appointment letters, employee survey forms could all go to the HR category.
• Notices, templates for terms of use agreements, confidentiality agreement templates could map to the legal category.
• Manuals, user guides, spec sheets would all fit in the technical category.

And so on.

At the end of this step, if you're building a WordPress document library for internal use, you should have mapped a list of documents for all your internal processes. You can also think team-wise and simplify this. To do this, note down all the teams at your company and then list the documents that each uses. 

Likewise, if you're building one for your customers, you should know what documents/files they need to do what they're looking to do. Review your support topics to see what these could be. For instance, if you run a career consultancy and help your users' create good resumes as a service, you could upload an ideal resume format to your support content and offer it as a downloadable right on your support page. 

You get the idea.

Explore: Best Email Subject Lines to Send Resume

Step #2: Define access levels for every single document 

Using your WordPress website to power a private, company-wide document library is pretty easy as WordPress lets you restrict access to your content to just logged-in users — your employees. Naturally, because you won't be saving any sensitive documents here, this arrangement works well. Many plugins also help you restrict access to your website's content.

Sharing documents publicly (via, let's say, a resources tab or a public self-service support content base) through WordPress is even easier as WordPress's pages and posts, even the ones that you've uploaded attachments/documents to, are public by default.

Explore: How to Create a Internal Knowledge Base

Step #3: Add the documents!

Now, WordPress doesn't support a document library right out-out-of-the-box, but with KnowAll, you can quickly build one. 

Basically, KnowAll is a WordPress-based knowledge base software that lets you build both internal and customer-facing, public knowledge bases. And because knowledge base content — especially the one from internal employee knowledge bases — often needs documents, KnowAll is ideal for building one. You could say that with its support for documents, it doubles up as a light-weight WordPress document solution, at least as it relates to support content.

To upload your documents, just do the following:

• Implement the structure you finalized in the first step by adding the relevant categories to your WordPress website.
• Populate your categories with the appropriate knowledge articles.
• Upload documents to all the knowledge base articles that need them.

So there you have it! Your very own WordPress document library. (By the way, if you only work with PDFs, here are some more ways to add them to your WordPress website.)

It's not meant to do everything a document management system does… but it can offer documents to your employees/customers when they need them. And that's the idea!

To maintain your library, keep returning to it from time to time to upload the most recent documents if newer versions get available. Also, delete unused files as they count toward storage.

Wrapping it up… 

The best part about creating a WordPress document library is that you can give access to all your documents to all your employees without getting each a subscription plan. And one single system (your knowledge base!) holds everything together right from the actual knowledge to the documents that power it or are needed for implementing it. So no one gets stuck. 

Adding documents, too, is as easy as attaching files, so anyone on your team can upload more files as the need arises; they don't need to know any coding.

Over to you: Up for creating a WordPress document library to power your knowledge workers? Check out KnowAll. Also, tell us how you currently manage documents at your company. 

The post How To Create a WordPress Document Library, Step-By-Step Guide first appeared on HeroThemes.