You will be underestimating your users if you think, they know nothing about your product/service. Some may even feel annoyed if you keep mailing them education resources for onboarding purposes. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a proper and thorough Knowledge Base for the ones who need assistance.
Knowledge Base is a subtle and polite way to educate your users about your product/service. Your users might never need to look into your Knowledge Base. But if they feel the need, they can do it anytime of the day and from their own living room, without first talking to your Support Team.
Why Do You Need Knowledge Base?
There are a couple of reasons why you need a Knowledge Base Website. The first reason is a well-crafted Documentation Page works as a great alternative to your support team. And as your Documentation is up and running 24/7, any user can access it and do self-servicing. According to a report, 80% of all users would go for self-servicing rather than seeking a support-ticket.
The second reason for having a Knowledge Base is it reduces the time gap between issuing a support ticket and receiving a response from the support team. In fact, if you have a well-organized Knowledge Base it will decrease the number of support tickets on your site. Users can find solutions for their problems in minutes.
And lastly, we are not saying a Knowledge Base is an alternative to the Support Team. It is not. They are both complementary to each other. Your Support team can free up a lot of time for solving complex issues. But that can only happen if you have a Knowledge-Base on your site.
Create a Knowledge Base for Free
If you have a WordPress Website and want to create your first Knowledge Base, you are in the right place. This blog will show you how you can create a Knowledge Base for free.
For this purpose, we are going to use the BetterDocs Plugin. BetterDocs is a brand new plugin from the WPDeveloper team. WPDeveloper currently boasts a staggering 400K user-base. Their latest plugin lets users create their first Documentation Page in minutes. And to answer the obvious question, it comes with all the basic features you will need to create your first Knowledge Base.
Without any further delay, let’s get right into it. You can create your very first Documentation Page using BetterDocs in under an hour. The steps are very easy. After installing BetterDocs on your WordPress Website, first, you need to adjust the layout of your Documentation Homepage and Single Page. After that, you need to add the right number of Tags and Categories for the purpose of better handling your Documentations.
Step One: Create Documentation Homepage and Single Page
BetterDocs gives you a ready-made Documentation Homepage, Single Doc & Archive Page layouts. It includes all the advanced features you look for in an easy-to-understand Documentation Page. You will get the Live Search option, Masonry Layout, Post Count, and individual features for each layout design. Just go through all, and make the changes according to your needs.
After you have installed and activated the plugin, you should first adjust the appearance of your Doc Homepage. In order to do so open your WordPress Dashboard and navigate to BetterDocs>>Settings>>Layout>>Documentation Page. From there you can toggle on/off Live Search, Masonry Layout, Enable Post Count, Explore More Button, and a lot more other options to get configured.
Once you are done adjusting the Documentation Homepage it will look something like this.
While adjusting the Documentation Homepage don’t forget to adjust the Single Page layout as well. You can do that from the same page you adjusted your Documentation Homepage from (BetterDocs>>Settings>>Layout>>Single Doc.). From here you can toggle on/off TOC, Sticky TOC, Breadcrumbs, Comment, and other features.
Once you are done adjusting the Documentation Homepage it will look something like this.
Even if you want you can configure the ‘Enable Sidebar Category List’ from the BetterDocs>>Settings>>Layout>>Archive Page, and change the overall outlook of your online documentation page by configuring the ‘Design’ section of BetterDocs Settings. 
You can change the outlook of your BetterDocs with each page layout appearance like Doc Page, Single Page, Side Bar, Archive Page, and Live Search just within a minute. Lots of exclusive features are added there to make your online documentation page every aspect beautiful and engaging for your customers.
Step Two: Create Category and Tags
Before you start writing Documentation for your WordPress Site, you need to first properly segregate the different types of products/services you have on your Website. It can be a SAAS tool, an extension pack to Microsoft Excel, or even WordPress Plugins/Themes.
After you have sorted them out, it’s time to communicate that to the BetterDocs Plugin. And how do you do that? You do that by creating Categories and Tags. If you have been using WordPress for some time now, you already know what Categories and Tags are. They are the most fundamental method of grouping homogeneous WordPress posts. You will find the Category and Tags option at the Sidebar that sits at the right-hand side inside the WordPress Editor.
Categories and Tags for the WordPress Posts are similar to that you create using BetterDocs. There is no difference. They will serve the same purpose of grouping homogeneous docs. They will also sit the right sidebar inside the WordPress Editor.
Step Three: Write and Publish your first Doc
When you are using BetterDocs, we recommend you think of Doc Pages as normal WordPress Posts. After you hit the “Add New” option from the BetterDocs sidebar menu, you will be taken inside the WordPress Editor.
From there draft your Doc as you would draft a WordPress post/blog, assign categories and tags to them, and when you are ready to publish, hit the Blue “Publish” button.
Other Existing Features
BetterDocs comes with a lot of other features as well i.e. TOC feature(PRO Feature). Using this feature you can display an overlay of the Table of Contents section right inside the Documentation Page. The benefit of this floating TOC is that it will stay afloat at the sidebar at all times. Your users can click on any of the headers, and they will be taken to that respective section under that header. Apart from the TOC feature it also comes with Advanced Analytics and Advanced Search Option with the PRO version.
Wrapping Up!
Before we conclude the blog, we have a question for you. Whose responsibility is it to educate your users about your product/service? If you do not properly educate your users about how to configure your service/product, how to benefit from its features, and how to master the advanced features, how can you build a loyal fan-base?
We will let you answer for yourself. But if you believe Knowledge Base is important, then you already know how to create one. Do leave a comment below if you have any further queries regarding how to create your first Knowledge Base.
