Learning how to create a knowledge base the right way saves your team hours of support every week. A well-built knowledge base reduces tickets, helps new users onboard faster, and gives your team a single source of truth. But most knowledge bases start with good intentions and end up as a graveyard of outdated articles that nobody can find.
The difference between a useful knowledge base and a neglected one comes down to how you build it. This guide walks through eight steps to create one that actually gets used. It covers everything from defining your audience to setting up feedback loops that keep content current.
Before diving into the how, it's worth understanding why a knowledge base is worth the investment:
The cost of not having a knowledge base is invisible but significant. It's the compounding time your team spends answering the same questions. It's the customers who churn because they couldn't figure something out. And it's the organic traffic you never capture.
Who is your knowledge base for? The answer shapes everything. It determines tone, structure, depth, and vocabulary.
This is the most common type. Your customers use it to learn your product, troubleshoot issues, and discover features they didn't know existed. The tone should be clear, friendly, and jargon-free.
Segment your audience further:
An internal knowledge base documents processes, policies, and institutional knowledge. It's where you store SOPs, onboarding materials for new hires, and technical runbooks.
Many SaaS companies maintain both. The external knowledge base faces customers. The internal one faces your team. Some tools let you manage both from a same platform with access controls.
Action item: Write down your primary audience and their top 10 questions before moving to step 2. This list becomes the foundation for your first batch of articles.
You probably have more documentation than you think. It's just scattered across the wrong places.
Create a spreadsheet with columns for: topic, source, existing content quality (good/needs rewrite/missing), priority (based on support ticket volume), and assigned writer. This becomes your content roadmap.
A flat list of articles doesn't scale. By the time you have 50 articles, users can't find anything without search. Plan your hierarchy upfront.
By feature area:
By user journey:
By persona:
Most SaaS knowledge bases use a feature-based structure because it maps directly to your product's navigation. Users think "I need help with the roadmap" and look for a Roadmap category.
Keep category and article names:
Now you're writing. Here's how to produce articles that are genuinely helpful.
Helpful, not corporate. Write like you're explaining something to a smart colleague who hasn't used your product before. Avoid marketing language in documentation. Users are there to learn, not to be sold.
Text-only knowledge base articles have lower comprehension rates than articles with visuals. For software products, screenshots and GIFs are essential.
Your knowledge base is only useful if users can find the right article. Search optimization happens at two levels: internal search within your knowledge base, and external search engines like Google.
Publishing an article is the beginning, not the end. You need to know whether articles actually help users.
Add a simple thumbs up/thumbs down widget to every article. This is the fastest signal for article quality. When an article has a low helpfulness score, it needs rewriting.
At the bottom of every article, add a prompt like: "Didn't find what you were looking for? Submit a request on our feedback board." This captures questions your knowledge base doesn't answer yet. It gives you a content roadmap driven by real user needs.
When your feedback board and knowledge base are integrated, as they are in ProductLift, you can see the direct relationship between support gaps and feature requests. A spike in feedback about a topic often means your knowledge base article on that topic is missing or unclear.
Track what users search for in your knowledge base. Pay special attention to:
The number one reason knowledge bases fail is stale content. An article that describes your product from 18 months ago actively harms the user experience. It's worse than having no article at all because it erodes trust.
One of the biggest time sinks in knowledge base maintenance is documenting new features. You ship something, update the changelog, and then need to separately write or update a knowledge base article. This disconnect is why documentation falls behind.
ProductLift solves this with AI-powered knowledge base generation. When you ship a feature and write a changelog entry, ProductLift's AI can automatically generate a draft knowledge base article from it. You review and publish the draft. No blank-page problem, no forgetting to document what you shipped.
Every article should have an owner. That is someone responsible for keeping it accurate. Without ownership, updates become everyone's job and therefore nobody's job. In smaller teams, this is one person. In larger teams, assign articles to the subject matter expert for each feature area.
If you want to get a knowledge base live within a week, here's the minimum viable approach:
You can always expand from there. The important thing is to start with content that addresses real support volume, not to build a complete documentation library before launching.
You can launch a basic knowledge base with 10-20 articles in one to two weeks. The initial setup of categories and tool configuration takes a day. Writing each article takes one to three hours depending on complexity.
Look for a tool with categories, search, custom domain support, and analytics. ProductLift includes a knowledge base alongside feedback boards, a roadmap, and a changelog. Standalone options like Zendesk Guide and Intercom Articles also work well.
Start with 10-20 articles covering your most common support questions. These articles will deflect the most tickets. You can expand over time based on search analytics and customer feedback.
Your support team is often the best starting point because they know the most common customer questions. Product managers can write feature documentation. For technical articles, involve your engineering team and have a writer edit for clarity.
Organize by product feature area (e.g., "Getting Started," "Integrations," "Billing"). This matches how users think about your product. Aim for 5-8 top-level categories. Fewer than 5 makes each too broad, and more than 8 makes browsing difficult.
Track support ticket deflection rate, article helpfulness scores, and search success rate. If your ticket volume per active user decreases over time, your knowledge base is doing its job. Review these metrics monthly.
Your knowledge base tool should make writing, organizing, and maintaining articles easy. It should not create extra work. Look for:
ProductLift includes all of these features as part of its all-in-one product feedback platform. Your knowledge base sits alongside your feedback boards, roadmap, and changelog. The entire loop from customer request to shipped feature to documented article happens in one place. Plans start at $14/month per admin with unlimited users. For a detailed comparison of options, see our guide to the best knowledge base software.
Start your free trial to see how an integrated knowledge base fits into your product workflow.
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Did you know 80% of software features are rarely or never used? That's a lot of wasted effort.
SaaS software companies spend billions on unused features. In 2025, it was $29.5 billion.
We saw this problem and decided to do something about it. Product teams needed a better way to decide what to build.
That's why we created ProductLift - to put all feedback in one place, helping teams easily see what features matter most.
In the last five years, we've helped over 3,051 product teams (like yours) double feature adoption and halve the costs. I'd love for you to give it a try.
Founder & Digital Consultant
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