How to Add Bing Webmaster Tools to WordPress

Checked for accuracy and updated on August 14, 2026.

Most WordPress owners connect Google Search Console and leave it there. Bing rarely comes up — but Bing powers search results for Bing itself, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and Ecosia combined. As of July 2026, that’s Bing at 4.47% of global search, Yahoo at 1.24%, DuckDuckGo at 0.65%, and Ecosia at 0.12% — 6.48% combined, and higher still in markets like the United States where Bing has a stronger foothold. For a site getting meaningful traffic, ignoring that slice is leaving real visitors on the table.

Bing Webmaster Tools gives the same kind of control over Bing indexing that Search Console gives for Google — sitemap submission, crawl/index status, search query data, crawl errors — plus a built-in SEO Analyzer flagging missing meta descriptions and broken links, a backlink checker, and URL inspection. Free, under ten minutes to set up, works in the background afterward.

Adding the Site

Sign in to Bing Webmaster Tools with a Microsoft account (free to create with any email), then click Add a Site and enter the site’s full URL — the exact HTTPS, www-or-not version everything else on the site redirects to. If Google Search Console is already verified, click Import from Google Search Console instead: sign in with the Google account, follow the import, and skip manual verification entirely — under two minutes and by far the easiest path if it’s available.

Verifying Ownership Without Risking a Fatal Error

Without the Search Console import, Bing asks for a meta tag verification — copy the tag it provides, which looks like <meta name="msvalidate.01" content="YOUR_CODE_HERE" />. Some guides suggest pasting a function into the active theme’s functions.php directly via Appearance → Theme File Editor — worth avoiding: a single typo in that editor can produce a fatal PHP error that takes the entire site offline immediately, with no easy way back in through the dashboard since the dashboard is what just broke. The safer route that does the identical job: a free plugin like Code Snippets, which runs the same function in an isolated, easily-disabled way if something goes wrong —

function add_bing_verification() {
    echo '<meta name="msvalidate.01" content="YOUR_CODE_HERE" />';
}
add_action( 'wp_head', 'add_bing_verification' );

Replace YOUR_CODE_HERE with the real code from Bing, save the snippet, and it persists through theme updates the same way the theme-file version would — just without the same blast radius if something’s mistyped. Return to Bing Webmaster Tools and click Verify; it crawls the homepage to confirm the tag is present. Don’t remove the tag after verifying — Bing rechecks it periodically, and its disappearance can cost the site its verified status.

Submitting the Sitemap, and What to Check After

Once verified, go to the Sitemaps section and submit the XML sitemap URL — usually https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml or https://yoursite.com/wp-sitemap.xml; check which one actually returns valid XML for the site before submitting. New pages get picked up over time from there with no further action needed. Add the URL Inspection tool to the post-publish routine — after a new post goes live, check whether Bing has crawled it yet, and request indexing directly from the tool if not. Run the SEO Analyzer once after initial setup to catch obvious issues (missing meta descriptions, broken links, slow pages) early rather than months later.

Bing treats https://example.com and https://www.example.com as separate properties — add whichever one is actually the site’s canonical URL, not both. Set this up alongside Google Search Console during initial configuration rather than as an afterthought; they take similar effort and cover different territory. Paired with Google Analytics 4 for on-site behaviour, that combination gives a genuinely complete picture of where traffic actually comes from — part of the last stretch of technical setup covered in the step-by-step guide to building a WordPress website, before the real focus shifts to content.