Changing your Help Center URL with host mapping

Host mapping puts your help centre on your own domain, which matters for trust and for search. Doing it at the start costs nothing; doing it later does.

Host mapping puts your help centre on your own domain, which matters for trust and for search. Doing it at the start costs nothing; doing it later does.

Set it up

1. Choose the address, usually a subdomain such as help at your domain.
2. Add a CNAME record pointing your chosen address at subdomain.zendesk.com.
3. Enter the address in the help centre settings.
4. Wait for the certificate to be issued.
5. Check the site loads over a secure connection.

Why it is worth doing

• Trust. A customer sent to a Zendesk subdomain wonders whether they are still with you.
• Search. Content on your own domain contributes to your presence rather than to somebody else's.
• Consistency. Links in your emails and on your website stay within your domain.

Do it before you publish, not after

The important part. Changing the address later means every existing link, every search result and every bookmark points at the old one.

Redirects help and they are not free. Doing it at the start costs nothing.

The certificate

Zendesk provisions one through Let's Encrypt, free with your plan, and renews it automatically before it expires. It takes a little time after the DNS record is in place, and until then the site is reachable but flagged as insecure. That is expected and it resolves itself.

One thing to check first: if your domain publishes CAA records at all, issue letsencrypt.org has to be among them, or the certificate cannot be issued. One certificate covers up to 100 host-mapped domains, and adding, updating or deleting any of them makes Zendesk replace the certificate for all of them.

See also

• SEO for your Help Center
• Creating a Help Center per brand
• Can I redirect people from my website without hurting SEO
• An error appears when signing in to my host-mapped domain