How to Host WordPress in China?
How to Host WordPress in China?

TLDR; This WordPress China tutorial provides you with a simple step-by-step set of instructions to deploy and host WordPress in mainland China.


What is WordPress?

WordPress is developed based on PHP, a free and open source veteran blog and content management system (CMS). WordPress has a rich and complete theme and available plugins. Nearly 40% of the websites in the world are using WordPress with the main website, e-commerce website, content management system and other purposes.

Popular examples include: Time’s official website, The official website of The Walt Disney Company, famous singer Katy Perry’s official website, and so on all use WordPress.


Is WordPress Available in China?

In a separate article, Does WordPress Work in China?, we performed a case study on 10 popular site’s including Walt Disney Company and Katy Perry’s official website to learn if WordPress is available in China out-of-the-box.


How to Deploy and Host WordPress in China 2022

This guide shows how to deploy and host a WordPress China site using 21YunBox in a few minutes. This deployment plan refers to the official WordPress best practice recommendations, using the full site HTTPS support, MySQL v5.6+ Database, and PHP v7.4+ technology are deployed, so that users can achieve the best WordPress effect.

If you prefer to deploy and host a WordPress as a headless CMS in China, please refer to this guide.

If you have an existing WordPress website that doesn’t work in China, contact us to learn how to get it working in China without a frontend rebuild.


Steps to Deploying Wordpress in China

  1. Signup on 21YunBox
  2. Create a MySQL database in 21YunBox
  3. Click “Hosted Applications” in the navigation menu, and then select “WordPress”

In terms of service configuration selection, the official WordPress documentation recommends using at least 1GB of RAM and 10GB cloud disks. If you choose a machine with fewer cloud disks for deployment, the deployment may fail.

4. Click Advanced Configuration and add the following environment variables:

Environment Variable Key Environment Variable Value
WORDPRESS_DB_HOST MySQL host name
WORDPRESS_DB_NAME MySQL database
WORDPRESS_DB_USER MySQL username
WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD MySQL user password

5. Click “Create Now”

In seconds, the WordPress instance will be deployed online and you can access it through https://<app_id>.21cloudbox.com.

WordPress instance deployment is successful!
WordPress instance deployment is successful!
After a simple configuration, the homepage rendering
After a simple configuration, the homepage rendering


Operation video

If you are not sure about the above steps, you can refer to the following operation demonstration:

How to deploy WordPress to the server?

Configure Custom Domain Dame

When you complete ICP Filing, You need to configure the custom domain name in the backend of 21YunBox and the dashboard of WordPress respectively, as follows:

1. Operation in WordPress

Find and modify “WordPress Address (URL)” and “Site Address (URL)” in the “Settings” of the dashboard to point to the custom domain name.

Configure a custom domain name for WordPress
Configure a custom domain name for WordPress


2. Operation in 21YunBox

Find “Custom Domain Name” in the “Settings” of the project, add the custom domain name and connect. For more details, please refer to: Custom Domain Name Configuration.


Configure Sending Mail Service

If you need to use WordPress to send emails, you can install the free WPMail SMTP plug-in and configure with the mail sending service provider, such as Mailgun, which will provide you a monthly quota of 10,000 emails for free.


More WordPress plugins

You can install new plugins in the WordPress dashboard. Here are a few commonly used WordPress plugins:



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