Home Help Center How to get an SSL certificate for your Help Center's custom domain?

How to get an SSL certificate for your Help Center's custom domain?

Last updated on Apr 10, 2024

With SSL, your customers can access your Help Center portal securely and without any risk of data breaches. We provide SSL certificates through the Chatwoot domain to ensure the security of your help documentation.

Let's create a product documentation portal for yourdomain.com. We will use this for the custom-domain docs.yourdomain.com. Follow the steps below.

Step 1. Open your Portal settings.

  • If creating a new portal, click the "New Portal" button.

  • If you have an existing portal, click "Settings" from your Help Center's secondary sidebar.

Step 2. Find the "Custom Domain" field and fill it up. Let us assume you are using docs.yourdomain.com.

Step 3. Click the "Create" or "Update" button as seen to save your settings.

Step 4. Next, you need to point your custom domain to chatwoot.help. To do this, open your name server, go to its DNS settings, and add a new CNAME record.

Add docs as a CNAME record for the above example and point it to chatwoot.help.

  • I am using the Cloudflare name server

    You can find the setting under the "DNS" tab.

  • I am using the AWS name server

    You can find the setting under the "Route53" service.

  • If you have a different server, these settings will be similar. Just find the DNS settings and add a CNAME record. Or search for How to add CNAME record with your nameserver?.

This will ensure that your CNAME record points to the Chatwoot server. We now have your portal information and the SSL certificate for your custom domain. In this case, docs.example.com.

Getting an SSL certificate​

Chatwoot provides SSL certificates for all cloud customers who set up a custom domain for their Help Center portal.

Contact our support to get your SSL certificate and provide them with your custom domain record. Alternatively, email us the subject line "Issue SSL certification for {Portal Slug}".

NOTE: We require 1-2 working days to set this up.​

docs.yourdomain.com is live with a secure connection, and your portal data is visible.

How does this work?​

When a customer points their custom domain to chatwoot.help through CNAME, DNS points it to Chatwoot's site. However, it's not yet valid.

When a customer requests to serve the docs.yourdomain.com endpoint with the portal's data, Chatwoot validates the routing from docs.yourdomain.com to chatwoot.help by adding a record in their Heroku dashboard. This validates the Heroku DNS routing and the custom domain.

To set this up, you can go to the Heroku dashboard, navigate to Chatwoot, and go to Settings -> Domains to add a new domain to serve, such as docs.yourdomain.com.

Customers need to point their custom domain to chatwoot.help through CNAME, and then request Chatwoot support to issue an SSL certification for their portal custom domain record. Once done, the SSL certificate is verified through Heroku DNS routing and custom domain validation.

To certify the record for docs.yourdomain.com, customers can go to their Cloudflare dashboard and add a record with HTTP validation and certificate type 'Provided by Cloudflare'. After waiting for the SSL certificate to become active, customers can check the ACM status for docs.yourdomain.com on Heroku, which should show Ok when completed.


Cloudflare's custom hostname functionality provides the certificate to the custom domain that we add.

  1. docs.yourdomain.com resolves by the customer's name server and redirects to chatwoot.help.

  2. chatwoot.help name server certifies docs.yourdomain.com.

  3. Chatwoot's Heroku domain's settings validate the certificate and routes to chatwoot.help root dashboard.

  4. chatwoot.help checks for the portal record with custom-domain docs.yourdomain.com.

  5. Redirects to the portal records for the domain docs.yourdomain.com.