How to verify (claim) a WordPress site on Pinterest

Step by step

1. Start the claim in Pinterest

Sign in to a Pinterest business account and open the account settings. Look for the section about claimed accounts, and start claiming a website. Pinterest offers several methods. Choose the one that adds an HTML tag. It shows a line in this form:

<meta name="p:domain_verify" content="abcdef0123456789abcdef0123456789"/>

Copy the whole line. Pinterest occasionally renames its settings screens, so if the wording differs, the thing to look for is the p:domain_verify tag.

2. Paste the code into WordPress

1. In wp-admin, open Hydrogen SEO → Webmaster Tools.
2. Find the Pinterest field. Each field has an Open link to the service and a reminder of where its code is found.
3. Paste the whole tag, or only the value inside content="…". From a pasted tag, only the code is kept.
4. Click out of the field. The code is saved immediately, and the tag that will be printed appears under it.

A code is a single token of letters, digits and a few punctuation marks, up to 100 characters. Anything else is rejected with a message and not saved, which catches a half-copied tag before it reaches your pages.

3. Check the tag on the homepage

curl -s https://example.com/ | grep -i "p:domain_verify"

You should get one line back. Purge your page cache and CDN first if you use them. Pinterest reads the homepage as a logged-out visitor would, so a coming-soon or maintenance page in front of the site will make the check fail.

4. Finish in Pinterest

Return to Pinterest and continue to the verification step. Enter your site address exactly as visitors reach it, with or without www, and submit. Pinterest checks the page and marks the site as claimed. The check is normally quick, though Pinterest says it can take longer. If it fails, compare the code in your page source with the one Pinterest shows, character by character.

5. Keep the tag in place

Leave the code saved. If the tag disappears, because the code was cleared, the plugin deactivated or the theme stopped calling wp_head(), the claim may lapse. When moving to a different SEO setup, copy the code first, or re-verify through DNS before switching.

6. Make your pages pin well

Verification attributes Pins to you. It does not make images pinnable or attractive. Three things do:

• Open Graph tags. Pinterest reads og:title, og:description and og:image to fill in a Pin made from your URL. Hydrogen SEO prints them by default.
• A tall image on key posts. Pinterest favours vertical images. A 2:3 ratio, such as 1000×1500 pixels, is the size Pinterest recommends for standard Pins. Add one in the post body even if your featured image is landscape.
• Alt text on images. It describes the picture when someone pins it straight from the page.

Without the plugin

The tag is one line in the head:

add_action( 'wp_head', function () {
    echo '<meta name="p:domain_verify" content="abcdef0123456789abcdef0123456789" />' . "\n";
}, 2 );

Put it in a child theme's functions.php or a small plugin, not in the parent theme's header.php, where an update would remove it. Pinterest also offers verification by uploading an HTML file to the site root or by adding a DNS TXT record. The DNS method does not depend on WordPress at all.

Troubleshooting a failed claim

• Tag not found: cached HTML. Purge and retest with curl.
• Wrong code found: an older p:domain_verify tag from a previous account is printed by the theme or another plugin. Remove it there.
• Site already claimed: a domain can be claimed by one Pinterest account at a time. The current holder has to release it.
• Subdomain mismatch: claiming example.com and running the site on shop.example.com are different things. Claim the address that serves the pages.