How to add Bing Webmaster Tools to WordPress

How to Add Bing Webmaster Tools to WordPress

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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. That group accounts for roughly 6–8% of all web searches globally, and more 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 you the same kind of control over Bing indexing as Search Console gives you for Google. You can submit sitemaps, check which pages are crawled and indexed, inspect search queries, and identify crawl errors. The tool is free, takes less than ten minutes to set up, and works in the background once you’re done.

This guide walks through how to create an account, add your WordPress site, verify ownership, and submit your sitemap. If you have already verified in Google Search Console, there is a faster import option that skips manual verification entirely.

What You Need to Do

To add Bing Webmaster Tools to WordPress: create a free account, add your site URL, verify ownership using a meta tag in your WordPress header or by importing directly from Google Search Console, then submit your XML sitemap. The whole process takes around ten minutes.

Why Bing Webmaster Tools Is Worth Setting Up

Google dominates search, but Bing’s ecosystem is larger than most people assume. DuckDuckGo uses Bing’s index for most of its results. Yahoo’s search results are powered by Bing. Ecosia, which tens of millions of people use as a privacy-friendly alternative, also draws from Bing. Setting up Bing Webmaster Tools means your WordPress site is visible across all of those engines — not just Google’s.

Beyond indexing, Bing Webmaster Tools includes a built-in SEO Analyzer that flags technical issues like missing meta descriptions and broken links, a Backlink checker, and a URL Inspection tool for checking whether specific pages have been crawled. It is lightweight but genuinely useful, and it costs nothing.

How to Add Bing Webmaster Tools to WordPress

Step 1 — Create a Bing Webmaster Tools account

Go to Bing Webmaster Tools and sign in with a Microsoft account. If you do not have one, you can create a free account with any email address. Once signed in, you will land on the main dashboard where you can add your site.

Step 2 — Add your site

On the dashboard, click Add a Site. Enter your full site URL — use the HTTPS version with whichever www or non-www format your WordPress site uses consistently. If your site redirects everything to https://example.com/, enter that exact URL.

If you have already verified your site in Google Search Console, click Import from Google Search Console instead. This pulls in your verified site automatically and skips manual verification. Sign in with your Google account when prompted and follow the import steps. In most cases it takes under two minutes and is the easiest method by far.

Step 3 — Verify ownership

If you are not importing from Google Search Console, Bing will ask you to verify site ownership. The recommended method is the XML meta tag. Copy the meta tag Bing provides — it looks like this:

<meta name="msvalidate.01" content="YOUR_CODE_HERE" />

To add this to WordPress without editing theme files directly, go to Appearance → Theme File Editor, open your active theme’s functions.php file, and add the following at the bottom:

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 actual code from Bing Webmaster Tools. This approach uses the wp_head hook so the tag persists regardless of theme updates. Save the file, then return to Bing Webmaster Tools and click Verify. Bing will crawl your homepage to confirm the tag is present.

Step 4 — Submit your sitemap

After verification, go to the Sitemaps section and submit your XML sitemap URL. For most WordPress sites the sitemap is at https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml or https://yoursite.com/wp-sitemap.xml — check which URL returns a valid XML file for your site before submitting. Once submitted, Bing will begin crawling and indexing your sitemap URLs. New pages you publish will be picked up over time without any further action.

Practical Tips

  • Set up Bing Webmaster Tools at the same time as Google Search Console — they take similar effort and cover different search engines. I always set both up during initial WordPress configuration.
  • Use the URL Inspection tool after publishing a new post to check whether Bing has crawled it. If not, you can request indexing directly from the tool.
  • Run the SEO Analyzer once after setup. It flags missing meta descriptions, broken links, and slow pages — a quick way to catch obvious issues early.
  • If you use Google Tag Manager to manage your site scripts, you can add the Bing verification meta tag through a custom HTML tag in Tag Manager instead of editing your theme files.

Common Mistakes

  • Adding the wrong URL. Bing treats https://example.com and https://www.example.com as separate properties. Add whichever version your WordPress site uses as its canonical URL — the one everything else redirects to.
  • Not submitting a sitemap. Verification alone does not tell Bing what to index. Always follow verification with a sitemap submission.
  • Removing the meta tag after verification. Bing re-checks it periodically. If it disappears, your site may lose its verified status.
  • Skipping Bing because it feels optional. Setting up Google Analytics 4 for on-site data alongside both Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools for search performance gives you a complete picture of where your traffic actually comes from.

Conclusion

Bing Webmaster Tools takes less than ten minutes to set up and gives you visibility across the entire Bing ecosystem — Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and Ecosia. If you have been following the step-by-step guide to building a WordPress website, adding Bing Webmaster Tools alongside Google Search Console is one of the last technical setup steps before you shift focus to content and growth.