How to make a Minecraft server website with WordPress

• Hosting and a domain. WordPress asks for PHP 8.3 or newer and MySQL 8 or MariaDB 10.11, over HTTPS. Any mainstream host does this.
• Or a WordPress.com plan, if you would rather not run the server yourself. Worth knowing: plugins used to need their most expensive tier and now install on every paid plan. The free plan still cannot install them, which rules it out for everything below.
• An afternoon. Installing is quick; choosing among sixty-eight thousand plugins is what takes the time.

Live server status. Search the plugin directory for “MC Server Status” or MrDino’s status card. Both are free, both are maintained, and neither needs anything installed on your game server — they query the public status ping, the same one the Minecraft client uses to draw the server list. You get online or offline, a player count and the message of the day.

Player heads. Several free plugins render avatars from a username through the public head services. Nothing to configure.

Forums. bbPress, from the WordPress people themselves, is on a hundred thousand sites and is kept current. It is a genuinely good forum.

Discord sign-in. Any general OAuth client plugin will do it. It is configuration rather than code: register an application with Discord, paste in two keys.

A theme that looks like Minecraft. There is at least one purpose-built commercial theme around the $29 mark. The big marketplaces have almost nothing, so expect to adapt a general theme.

Ranks, leaderboards and punishments are the three people ask about, and we could not find a plugin for any of them — not in the WordPress directory, not on the big theme marketplaces, not through targeted searching. That is not an accident, and the reason is worth understanding before you start building.

None of that data is in the status ping. The ping tells you a server is up and roughly who is on it. A player’s rank lives in LuckPerms. Their playtime lives in your stats plugin. Their ban lives in LiteBans. Those are three separate databases on your machine, and nothing outside your server can read them by asking politely.

So a bridge has two halves: a plugin on the game server that reads those databases and sends the values out, and an endpoint on the website that receives and stores them. Anyone building this on WordPress is writing both — a Bukkit plugin in Java and a WordPress REST endpoint in PHP — and then maintaining them against both WordPress releases and Minecraft releases.

What exists instead. There are plugins that run a console command when somebody buys something, which is the same trick pointed the other way — a one-off write into the game rather than an ongoing read out of it. Useful, and not the same thing. For punishments, the usual answer is a standalone PHP ban list that sits beside the site with its own look and its own login.

Tebex’s own plugins are for game servers, not for WordPress, so there is no official way to show your Tebex packages on a WordPress page. The WooCommerce bridges that exist are built to replace Tebex — you take payments yourself and the plugin runs the commands — which also makes you the merchant, with the tax and the chargebacks that come with that. Worth deciding deliberately rather than discovering later.

WordPress core has an excellent security record — six vulnerabilities reported in core across a year, against more than eleven thousand across the wider ecosystem, of which around nine in ten were in plugins. Anyone telling you WordPress is insecure is wrong, and the real shape of it is more useful: the plugin surface is both why WordPress can do anything and where the risk lives.

Practically, that means updates are a standing job, and the Minecraft plugins are the fragile end of it — the ones in the directory range from updated last month to untouched for ten years, and they do not agree about which PHP version they want. Budget for the afternoon a year when one of them stops working.

Pick WordPress if your site is mostly writing and the server data is decorative; if you need something we do not build — events, courses, memberships, several languages, a full shop; if you have a developer, or the budget for one; if you want to own the database and the files and be able to move them anywhere. Sixty-eight thousand plugins is a real answer to “can it do X”, and our module list is not in that league.

Pick us if what you wanted was the Minecraft part: ranks on profiles and posts, leaderboards from whatever your server tracks, punishments, playtime, a live roster — all of it arriving from your server through one plugin, with a forum and a Tebex store beside it. That is the part WordPress leaves you to build, and it is the whole of what we do.