How to get green links on your Mastodon profile with WordPress

The green links on your Mastodon profile indicate that you are the owner of that link i.e. that website.

You can achieve this by adding a little line of code to your website (see Link verification).

When you have a basic HTML website, adding this piece of code is this trivial.

However when your site runs on WordPress, it’s a bit different.

I found a tutorial that only works with a newer version of Gutenberg (in anticipation of a 2023 WordPress release). But there is also another — easier — way.

When you run a regular WordPress 6.1 site, this is how you do it.

I link to my social media profiles from a menu. My guess is that most people want to use it like this. And one of these links in my menu is a Mastodon link. This is the link where you need to add the me value for the rel attribute.

These are the steps:

1. Select Appearance
2. Select Menus
3. Select your specific Menu (in my case Social Footer Menu).
4. Select Screen Options
5. Checkmark the Link Relationship (XFN)
6. add me to your menu under Link Relation (XFN).
7. Save!

Step 5 is the trick. This step will add an extra — otherwise hidden — option field to your links.

I got this tip from this here.

Now you just have to wait for your Mastodon instance to check your links. This happens periodically (I would say daily?). But I notice you can also trigger this check by (making a change and) saving your Mastodon profile.

And that’s it.

Look how green!

Your Mastodon instance will check your links periodically. But I notice you can also trigger it by (making a change and) saving your profile.