diff --git a/docs/README.md b/docs/README.md
index ac7f58030b..26eca8d3bc 100644
--- a/docs/README.md
+++ b/docs/README.md
@@ -38,8 +38,7 @@ Zulip development environment provisioning, and you can build the
 documentation using:
 
 ```
-cd docs/
-make html
+./tools/build-docs
 ```
 
 and then opening `http://127.0.0.1:9991/docs/index.html` in your
diff --git a/tools/build-docs b/tools/build-docs
new file mode 100755
index 0000000000..5fc65d5a10
--- /dev/null
+++ b/tools/build-docs
@@ -0,0 +1,5 @@
+#!/usr/bin/env bash
+
+cd "$(dirname "$0")"/../docs
+rm -rf _build
+make html
diff --git a/tools/test-documentation b/tools/test-documentation
index 7890d9c221..58b4c6627d 100755
--- a/tools/test-documentation
+++ b/tools/test-documentation
@@ -13,9 +13,9 @@ case $1 in
     ;;
 esac
 
-cd "$(dirname "$0")"/../docs
-make html
-cd ../tools/documentation_crawler
+cd "$(dirname "$0")"/..
+./tools/build-docs
+cd ./tools/documentation_crawler
 
 echo -en "\033[0;94m"
 echo "Testing links in documentation..."