A guide to the Freshdesk portal: Add a support widget to your website

So, you're looking to put a support widget on your website. Good call. It's one of the best ways to give your customers answers right where they are, cutting down on frustration and saving your team some precious time.

The native Freshdesk help widget is a popular first stop for this. It connects your website directly to your support portal, letting customers search for help articles or submit a ticket without having to open a new tab. It’s a solid, straightforward tool.

But let's be real, customer support isn't just about simple search bars anymore. Great support today is conversational, smart, and can pull answers from all over the place, not just a single knowledge base. The good news? You can get that level of AI-powered help without ditching the help desk you're already using.

What is the Freshdesk help widget?

The Freshdesk help widget is a small, embeddable tool that acts as a bridge between your website and your Freshdesk support portal. Think of it as a little window that lets your customers peek into your support content without leaving the page they're on.

It’s built to do two main things:

1. Ticket Submission: It gives customers a contact form to create new support tickets. This is way more convenient than making them hunt down a "Contact Us" page and fill out a totally separate form.

2. Self-Service: It has a search bar that lets customers look up and read articles from your Freshdesk knowledge base. This helps them find their own answers to common questions, which is a win-win.

At its heart, it’s a traditional self-service portal. A customer types in a question, and the widget serves up a list of matching articles. It’s a direct lookup. While that's useful, it isn't a conversational AI. It can’t understand tricky questions or walk a user through a problem; it can only point them to content you’ve already written.

Key features of the Freshdesk help widget

The native widget comes with a decent set of features for getting a basic support option on your site. But as you start using it, you might bump into some limitations, especially if you're trying to make your support more efficient as you grow.

Integrated contact form

The most obvious benefit of the widget is letting users submit tickets from any page on your site. You can set it up as a simple form with the basics (name, email, subject, description) or use a more detailed one that includes all the custom ticket fields you've set up in Freshdesk.

It also has options for letting customers attach files and for enabling a CAPTCHA to keep spammy tickets out of your queue. It’s a functional way to grab support requests right when they happen.

Knowledge base access

This is the self-service part of the widget. It brings your solution articles to the forefront, letting customers search for answers before they decide to reach out. Freshdesk gives you two ways to set this up:

• Neutral: This mode shows both the search bar for articles and a "Contact us" button. It gives the customer the choice.

• Optimized for deflection: This mode is a little more assertive. It hides the contact form at first, nudging the user to search for an article. The contact form only shows up after they’ve opened an article and marked it as "not helpful."

The catch here is the rigidity. This whole system lives and dies by how complete and well-written your knowledge base is. If an answer isn't in an article, or if a customer phrases their question in a way your article titles don't expect, they hit a wall. This pushes them to submit a ticket, which kind of defeats the purpose of self-service.

A screenshot of the Freshdesk knowledge base, which is a key feature when you Freshdesk portal add support widget to website.

Widget customization

You can tweak the widget to better match your brand’s look and feel. Freshdesk lets you change the widget's color, its position on the page (bottom-left or bottom-right), and the text on the little button that opens it.

However, one key customization is often locked behind a paywall. If you want to get rid of the "by Freshworks" branding, you'll need to be on one of their paid plans (Growth or higher). For businesses trying to create a seamless brand experience, that can be a bit of a snag.

Advanced API control

For teams with developers, Freshdesk offers a Widget API. This lets you do things like programmatically pre-fill form fields, hide certain options based on who the user is, or even authenticate logged-in users to show them restricted articles.

While that's pretty powerful, it points to another limitation: complexity. To get the widget to do anything beyond the basics, you need a developer and some technical know-how. This puts advanced customizations out of reach for many non-technical support teams who just want more control over their tools.

How to add the Freshdesk support widget to your website

Getting the Freshdesk widget running on your site is a fairly standard copy-and-paste job. Here’s a quick rundown of the steps:

1. First, log into your Freshdesk account and head to Admin > Channels > Widgets.

2. From there, you can create a new widget or edit an existing one. You'll set up its content (which contact form and solution articles to show) and its appearance.

3. Once you’re happy with it, go to the Embed code tab and copy the JavaScript snippet they give you.

4. Finally, paste this code into your website's HTML. The usual spot is right before the closing "" tag on every page where you want the widget to pop up.

If your site is built on a platform like WordPress or Shopify, the process might be a bit different. WordPress has an official Freshdesk plugin that simplifies things, and on Shopify, you’d typically edit your theme’s "footer.liquid" file to add the code.

This manual, code-based approach works, but it's not a dynamic solution. The widget itself is just a container; it doesn't learn from interactions or get any smarter over time. The pressure is always on you to constantly create, update, and manage all the content inside Freshdesk.

Limitations of the Freshdesk help widget

The Freshdesk widget is a good start, but it’s based on an older idea of self-service. Modern support needs to be more than just a search bar. Here’s where tools like the native widget start to show their age.

The static knowledge gap

The widget can only find answers that exist in perfectly written, up-to-date knowledge base articles. It can't look at a successfully resolved ticket from last week and use that solution to help a customer today. It can’t pull an answer from a technical spec sheet in a Google Doc or a process outline in Confluence. This leaves your support team on a constant content treadmill, always trying to document everything.

Lack of true conversational AI

Let’s be clear: the Freshdesk widget is a search tool, not an intelligent chatbot. It can’t understand nuanced questions, ask for more detail, or guide a user through a multi-step troubleshooting process. If a customer asks, "My connection keeps dropping, what should I do?" the widget can only search for articles with those keywords. A real AI agent would ask, "Have you tried restarting your router?" and guide them from there.

The siloed knowledge problem

Your company’s actual knowledge isn’t just in your help desk. It’s scattered across product roadmaps in Confluence, internal policies in Google Docs, and team chats in Slack. The Freshdesk widget is completely blind to all of this, which means customers get incomplete answers based on only a small fraction of your company's total wisdom.

An infographic showing how eesel AI connects scattered knowledge from multiple sources, a smarter way to Freshdesk portal add support widget to website.

A smarter alternative

This is the gap that a tool like eesel AI is built to fill. It’s not a replacement for your help desk; it’s a smart layer that integrates directly with Freshdesk to solve these problems.

• Unify your knowledge, instantly: eesel AI connects to your Freshdesk knowledge base and past tickets, but it doesn’t stop there. It also hooks into over 100 other sources like Confluence, Google Docs, and Slack. It pieces together information from all your scattered knowledge to provide one comprehensive, accurate answer.

• Go live in minutes, not months: Forget about complicated setups. eesel AI is designed to be self-serve. You can connect your help desk, train the AI on your knowledge sources, and have a working agent ready in minutes, all without a single sales call or line of code.

• Test with confidence: Worried about letting an AI talk to your customers? eesel AI has a powerful simulation mode that lets you test your setup on thousands of your past tickets. You can see exactly how it would have responded, giving you a real forecast of its resolution rate before you turn it on. It’s a completely risk-free way to get started.

A screenshot of the eesel AI simulation mode, a feature that enhances how you Freshdesk portal add support widget to website.

Freshdesk pricing overview

When you're looking at Freshdesk, it's helpful to know that their AI features are usually sold as separate add-ons, which can make the pricing a bit tricky. First, here are the core help desk plans.

Plan	Price (Billed Annually)	Key Features
Growth	$15/agent/month	Ticketing, Knowledge Base, Reports
Pro	$49/agent/month	Everything in Growth + Custom Objects, Advanced Routing
Enterprise	$79/agent/month	Everything in Pro + Audit Logs, Skill-based Assignment

Now, about those AI features. If you want to add Freshworks' native AI, "Freddy AI," you'll need to buy additional modules:

• Freddy AI Copilot: This costs an extra $29/agent/month and is needed for agent-assist features like generating replies.

• Freddy AI Agent: This is for automated resolutions. After an initial 500 free sessions, it costs $100 per 1,000 sessions.

This à la carte pricing means costs can add up quickly and become unpredictable, especially during busy months. In contrast, platforms like eesel AI offer straightforward, all-inclusive plans based on a set number of interactions. You get all the features without worrying about per-resolution fees, which makes your costs simple and predictable.

A smarter way to enhance your Freshdesk support

The native Freshdesk widget is a functional tool for offering basic self-service. It gets a contact form and a simple knowledge base search onto your website, and that's a good start. But it's held back by its reliance on static, siloed articles.

To deliver the kind of instant, intelligent support experience customers expect these days, you need an AI layer that can understand questions, have real conversations, and learn from all of your company’s knowledge.

That’s why eesel AI is the perfect partner for your Freshdesk setup. It enhances the help desk you already have, giving you a top-tier AI support widget without the pain and cost of switching to a whole new platform. You get the best of both worlds: the power of Freshdesk for ticketing and the intelligence of eesel AI for your frontline support.

Ready to see what a truly smart support widget can do? Connect your Freshdesk account to eesel AI in minutes and simulate its impact on your real support tickets for free.