Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Access | Admin |
Deeper structures feel organised and are harder to use. Two levels serves most help centres.
What is available
Category, then section, then subsections on some plans. So you can build three or four levels before reaching a single article.
Why deeper is usually worse
- Every level is a decision for the reader, and each one loses some of them.
- Filing becomes ambiguous. Where two subsections could hold an article, two people file it differently, and it is found by neither.
- It hides how much you have. Two hundred articles in a deep tree look like twenty.
The rule of thumb
Two levels for most help centres. Three when a category genuinely has enough articles that a flat section list is unusable, which in practice means dozens.
If you are reaching for a fourth level, the problem is usually that a category is doing too much.
Search does the finding anyway
Most readers arrive from a search engine or your search box, straight into an article. The tree is for browsing and for your own maintenance, and neither benefits from depth.
An article can appear in several places
Where something genuinely belongs in two sections, article placement handles that. That is often the honest answer to "which section does this go in", rather than inventing a level.
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