Removal of legacy Help Center Mobile site

Announced on	Removal
February 25, 2021	November 15, 2021

This article describes the removal of the legacy Help Center Mobile site and covers the following topics:

• What does this mean?
• Why is Zendesk removing the legacy Help Center Mobile site?
• Who is affected by the change?
• What should I do if I am affected by this?
• What happens if I do not migrate before the removal date?

What does this mean?

Effective November 15, 2021, Zendesk will no longer serve the legacy Help Center Mobile Site to mobile devices with accounts that currently have it enabled.

Why is Zendesk removing the legacy Help Center Mobile site?

The Help Center Mobile site was built in 2013 as an adaptive experience on top of jQuery Mobile. At the time, providing an adaptive experience to mobile devices was a common way of adapting web content to less powerful smartphones with smaller screens. Over time, web technologies and devices have improved, and responsive web design has become the industry standard. Responsive websites allow you to provide a customizable, branded experience to all devices across many screen sizes. 

Since the June 2016 release of the Copenhagen theme for the Help Center, we have provided a responsive theme for all customers. In March 2017, we disabled the Help Center Mobile site for all new customers as well as any existing customers who upgraded to the Copenhagen theme after that date.

Moreover, the Help Center Mobile site has limited compatibility with recently released features. For example, our Templating API v2, which provides better performing and more accessible Help Centers, does not support the Mobile site. Learn more about Guide templating here.

Who is affected by the change? 

All Guide accounts that currently have the Help Center Mobile site enabled will be affected. Follow these steps to check if your site will be impacted:

• Find your setting in Guide admin > Guide Settings. 
• If the checkbox of the Mobile Layout setting is selected then your Help Center has the mobile site enabled and you will be affected. 
• If you do not see the Mobile Layout setting, then it is not enabled and you will not be affected. 

What should I do if I am affected by this?

If you have a custom theme that is responsive, you will not have to do anything - your responsive theme will already be served to your customers on their mobile device. You can easily check if your theme is responsive by opening your Help Center in your web browser and resizing the window. Your theme is responsive if the design automatically adjusts to the new window size. If your theme is based on the Copenhagen theme, it is responsive (see Copenhagen, our responsive Help Center theme for more information). 

Important: If your theme is not responsive, do not deselect the Mobile layout checkbox, we advise you to update your theme in order to provide an optimal experience to your end users.

The following options will help you achieve a responsive theme:

• Update an existing theme by applying responsive design principles (see Responsive Web Design, Customizing your Help Center theme, and the Help Center Templates developer documentation for details).
• Create a new theme based on the Copenhagen theme (see Using the standard Copenhagen theme in Help Center).
• Purchase a theme from Zendesk Marketplace (see Using Guide themes from the Zendesk Marketplace).

Once your theme is responsive, and you're ready to turn off your mobile help center, then you can update your Guide settings to disable the Mobile layout as shown in the screenshot above.

Warning: This is a legacy feature. If you deselect the Mobile layout checkbox, you are disabling mobile layout and the checkbox will disappear. You cannot re-enable it again.

What happens if I do not migrate before the removal date?

If your theme is not responsive and you do not make changes to it, your Help Center’s desktop-optimized theme will be provided to customers on their mobile devices.