Gorgias Help Center: Setup Guide, Limits and Costs (2026)

The Gorgias Help Center is the FAQ site and knowledge base that comes with every Gorgias Helpdesk plan at no extra cost, from Starter at $10 a month billed monthly upward. Your bill grows with billable tickets, not with the help center, and our Gorgias pricing guide covers that meter. One catch shapes the launch date. You cannot create a help center during the 7-day free trial ^[1], so the build starts the day you upgrade. Only the account owner, admins and leads can set it up. Plan on five stages: content, branding, placement, self-service, then measurement.

Before you start: plan, trial and who builds it

The help center is a native part of the helpdesk, not an add-on, so no plan is too small for it. What changes by plan is scale: the custom Enterprise plan sold through sales lists unlimited Help Centers. The trial rule matters more than the plan. Setup you do during the trial is kept until you upgrade, but the help center itself waits. An account that never upgrades is deleted with its data after 90 days, so test the rest of the helpdesk early and keep your article drafts in a document until you pay.

Roles are strict. Owners, admins and leads create and manage help centers; everyone else can only read published articles. A new help center stays invisible to shoppers until you set it live and then embed it or share its subdomain. That gives you room to build quietly. The same lead or admin rule applies when a team connects an outside assistant through the Gorgias MCP: help center tools need that role, and articles written that way are saved as drafts rather than published.

Readers browsing articles do not touch your bill. Contact form submissions do. Each one becomes an Email ticket, and it turns billable once a human agent, a Rule or AI Agent replies. On Basic, which includes 300 tickets a month at $60 a month billed monthly, a month with 400 billable tickets comes to $100, by our arithmetic. That is why deflection is worth the setup time.

Stage 1: fill it with articles before you style it

Start with content, because an empty help center is worse than none. Gorgias gives you three shortcuts. The helpdesk ships six general article templates, and layout templates in CSV format cover six industries: clothing and footwear, furniture and homewares, food and beverage, pet supplies, beauty, and general subscription. A Gorgias blog post adds 50 more article templates if you want wording to adapt.

Moving from another tool is the faster route. Articles and categories import directly from Zendesk, HelpDocs, Re:amaze and Intercom, or in bulk from a CSV file ^[2]. Appearance and custom scripts do not come across. Status does: public articles stay public, private ones become unlisted, and drafts stay drafts. There is no direct export in the other direction. To get your articles out later, you request a data export from Gorgias support, so keep your own copy of anything you write inside the editor.

The third shortcut is AI. The setup wizard shows five AI article drafts built from your ticket data, refreshed every three to six months, and you manage them later in AI Library. The limits are tight. Suggestions come only in English, your default help center language must be English, and approved drafts land uncategorized. Only admins or leads can edit and publish them. The drafts can draw on tickets imported from Zendesk, Gmail, Outlook and Facebook, which helps a store that just migrated.

Stage 2: brand it and give it your domain

Pick the layout first, because it limits the rest. You choose between a one-page layout and a card layout. One-page caps article text at 16px, drops heading styles, and is disabled once you nest categories more than one level deep. Stores with a long catalog of policies usually need the card layout for that reason alone.

Branding stays inside the settings screen. You get light and dark themes, a default font and icon color, and a font library of more than 1300 fonts, mostly from Google Fonts, plus custom fonts. Keep the logo under 500KB; Gorgias recommends 1640 by 624 pixels. Category images can reach 10 MB, though 500 KB or less and 318 by 160 pixels are the recommendation. For deeper changes, the Extra HTML toggle lets you replace the header, footer and head per language, which removes the standard navigation and social links.

The default address is a gorgias.help subdomain. A custom domain works through a CNAME record pointing to clients.gorgias.help, and verification can take up to 48 hours. Set the domain before you announce the help center, so links in emails and search results never change. You can then write a meta title and description for the help center as a whole and for each article and category. Unlisted articles stay out of help center search and search engines, open only by direct URL.

Stage 3: embed it and wire up the contact routes

Placement depends on your store. One help center can be auto-embedded on only one store, and the no-code auto-embed works only on non-headless Shopify stores. Every other site uses the HTML embed. The embedded version has a fixed width and background color, which custom CSS can override. On Shopify, add the help center link under Online Store, then Navigation, and in order confirmation emails by editing their HTML. That last step needs basic HTML skills.

Next, decide how shoppers reach a person. Contact cards can show Email or Contact Form, Chat and Phone; the Phone card takes one or more phone integrations, and you can switch the chat widget on inside the help center itself. The contact form needs full name, subject, email and message, caps the message at 5,000 characters and the name and email at 100, and accepts images, video, documents and archives. You can predefine the subject lines shoppers pick from, with an optional free-text choice.

One mail quirk deserves a check. With Outlook, contact form submissions are marked as spam until someone marks them safe, so test a submission before launch. Rules can tag, assign or auto-reply to contact form tickets, and a view can filter by that channel. Remember the billing rule above: a Rule auto-reply makes the ticket billable.

Stage 4: add self-service and feed AI Agent

The help center can do more than answer. With an AI Agent subscription it hosts self-service tools, and each has its own conditions. The store platform decides most of them, because AI Agent, Shopping Assistant and Order Management work only with a connected Shopify store. BigCommerce stores (Basic plan and higher) and Magento 2 stores (Pro plan and higher) keep Flows and Article Recommendations instead, while WooCommerce stores get neither.

The Order Management portal works only with Shopify ^[3]. Shoppers log in with a 6-digit code sent by email or SMS, then use four customizable flows: Track, Return, Cancel and Report Issue. Cancel and return buttons submit a request that an agent still has to process. With Loop Returns chosen as the return method, shoppers jump to the Loop portal already logged in.

Cost follows the resolution. A request that Flows or Order Management resolves alone carries only the automation fee, with no ticket fee, while a request AI Agent resolves alone bills both the automation fee and a helpdesk ticket. The AI Agent subscription costs $30 a month on Starter (billed monthly only), $30 billed monthly or $27 billed annually on Basic, $190 or $171 on Pro, and $530 or $477 on Advanced. It includes 30, 30, 190 and 530 automated interactions a month on those plans, which works out to $1.00 each on monthly or $0.90 on annual billing, then $1.50 per automated interaction past the limit. If the shopper still reaches an agent within 72 hours, it bills as a ticket instead.

Your articles also feed AI Agent. Published articles, public or unlisted, can be switched on as AI Agent knowledge one by one, and drafts are never used in live conversations. Gorgias warns that content which contradicts itself, such as a 30-day return window in an article and 14 days in guidance, can make AI Agent answer inconsistently, so keep the two aligned. With an AI Agent subscription and a connected Shopify store, articles keep a version history, with per-version performance for the past 28 days. Our Gorgias AI playbook covers guidance and skills.

Stage 5: read what shoppers search for

Measurement is built in. The Help Center report runs on all Helpdesk plans once at least one help center is published, and since 13 October 2026 it sits beside Overview and Channels in the new Helpdesk Performance Analytics. It tracks article views, searches, searches with results, articles clicked, click-through rate and no-result searches, with bot traffic excluded ^[4].

Two readings trip people up. Article views count repeat views by the same person, so they are not unique visitors. An article rating is calculated across all time, while the thumbs-up and thumbs-down counts cover only your selected dates. The most useful view is the Search terms table filtered to searches without results. Those are your next articles. You can also filter the whole report by language.

Google Analytics adds traffic data without a script: paste a Universal Analytics or GA4 ID. It cannot see searches, contact form use, tickets avoided or article feedback, and Gorgias says it does not record the data sent to Google. Search tracking in Analytics needs a Google Tag Manager workaround added through Extra HTML, one help center at a time.

The bottom line

The Gorgias Help Center costs nothing beyond your Helpdesk plan, and it earns its keep by moving questions away from billable tickets. Build it in order: import or template your content, fix the layout and domain before launch, embed it and test the contact form, then add Flows or the Shopify-only Order Management portal if you already pay for AI Agent. Wait out the trial first. Then let the no-result searches tell you what to write next.