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What does the Hosting Team do?

To improve the hostingHosting A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website accessible via the World Wide Web. experience and educate people on the best practices on hosting WordPress, the Hosting Team is working on several projects.

There is a set of hosting best practices in the Hosting Handbook, including Performance, Reliability, Security and Server Environment recommendations.

The team also runs and maintains a set of automated hosting tests that run across the hosting environment of many hosting companies. You can set up tests to run on your hosting environment(s), and help improve the tools through fixing bugs, adding features, or improving the design of the test reporter pages.

Improving Hosting Handbook

The Handbook contains information about the Hosting Team, along with hosting recommendations for running WordPress.

The recommendations were put together by the team and used as a basis for Site Health recommendations in WordPress. They’re meant both as a reference for folks learning to host WordPress, and a way to help WordPress and Hosts improve together.

Improvements in the development of the Automated Hosting Tests

The handbook is in the process of being audited and improved. You can see the progress and contribute through Github.

You can propose improvements or solve those available in both the PHPUnit test runner (issues) and the PHPUnit test reporter (issues).

The Runner repo contains the parts of the hosting tests that run on a host, and the Reporter repo contains the pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party. that runs on WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ for receiving and displaying the tests.

First Steps for New Contributors

Slack

You can find the global WordPress SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. at wordpress.slack.com. A signup and walkthrough are available at chat.wordpress.org. When you are in, find the #hosting channel.

You can sign up using your WordPress.org username. If you don’t have one, create a WordPress profile and you’ll be able to create an account as MyWordPressUsername@chat.wordpress.org, replacing MyWordPressUsername with your WordPress.org username.

Meetings: What to expect

The meeting is usually to connect about WordPress happenings throughout the week connected with hosting and to catch up on the status of the team’s ongoing projects.

The agenda usually consists of the following topics:

Greetings
About the WordPress Community
About the WordPress Hosting Team
Open Floor

During the Greetings we do a “Wave in” to get an overview who is in for the meeting and check how everyone is doing. New attendees are welcomed to introduce themselves.

In the About the WordPress Community section the team talks about the latest happenings in the WordPress space and their impacts on hosts. Examples are new WordPress releases, new proposals or WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They’re one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more..

The About the WordPress Hosting Team part of the meeting focuses on open tasks or issues on hosting related projects like the Handbook or the Automated Hosting Tests. Additionally, we handle requests from other teams here.

Everything else up for discussion will be handled during the Open Floor. Every attendee can bring up topics here to discuss or just to inform hosts.

Meetings: Taking notes

Taking meeting notes is a great way to help out!

During each meeting, we create a post summarizing what is discussed, to make it easier for those who can’t attend to stay informed. You can see examples of notes from previous meetings on the Hosting Team’s Make site.

There’s always a need for more folks to join! If you’re interested in helping out with taking notes, chat with one of the Team Reps for access to the team’s make site.

Step–by–step: how to create meeting notes

Request access
- Ask in the #hosting channel for access to the Hosting Make site.
- A Team Rep can grant you the required role so that you can create and edit posts at `https://make.wordpress.org/hosting/wp-admin/`.
Start from an existing template
- In the WordPress admin, go to Posts All Posts.
- Find a recent “Hosting Team meeting summary” or “Hosting Meeting Notes” post.
- Use the “Duplicate”/”Copy to new draft” option to create a new draft from that post. This keeps the basic structure and headings for you.
Update the post details
- Change the title to follow the current format, for example: Hosting Team meeting summary 2025-11-26.
- Update the date and time in the introduction and add a link to the Slack archive, if available.
- Check the tags and keep them consistent with previous notes, typically including: meetings, summary, and weekly-hosting-chat.
Write the notes
- Use the headings from the agenda (for example: Greetings, About the WordPress Community, About the WordPress Hosting Team, Open Floor) and add short summaries for each topic that was discussed.

What to include in the notes

When writing the content, aim to include:

Meeting context – date, time, and the Slack channel where the meeting was held.
Link to the agenda, if one was published.
Key discussion points for each agenda item, written as short, neutral summaries.
Decisions made, if any (for example, “The team agreed to…”).
Action items, ideally with who will follow up and, if known, by when.
Links to related tickets, PRs, and posts mentioned during the meeting.
Next meeting information – date, time, and channel.
Props / acknowledgements to people who helped prepare the agenda, notes, or specific work.

Try to keep the tone neutral and descriptive (not personal opinion), and avoid wording that sounds like an official statement on behalf of WordPress.org unless this has been explicitly agreed by the team.

Review and publication

When you are satisfied with the draft, set the post status to “Pending review”.
Share a link to the draft in the #hosting channel and ask for a quick review.
A Team RepTeam Rep A Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts. or another experienced contributor will review, make any small adjustments if needed, and publish the notes.

You can check out additional recommendations on writing style in this Core Handbook page. They don’t all apply because it’s a guide from CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Team builds WordPress. — the biggest thing is to be careful not to accidentally represent WordPress.org or the team if it’s not a WordPress.org or team decision, and to get peer review before posting.

Also, you can access the #hosting channel on Slack, check it, and start participating. The team always has something to do!

Contributor Day Notes

If you want to get an idea of what a contributor dayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/. with the hosting team might look like, take a look at some work notes from the team from previous contributor days!

If you are interested in the Hosting Team, you may be interested in these other teams as well:

Core: The core team makes WordPress. Whether you’re a seasoned PHPPHP PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a general-purpose scripting language especially suited to web development. PHP code is usually processed on a web server by a PHP interpreter. On a web server, the result of the interpreted and executed PHP code would form the whole or part of an HTTP response., HTMLHTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. HTML describes the structure of a web page semantically and originally included cues for the appearance of the document., JavaScriptJavaScript JavaScript, often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language. It has curly-bracket syntax, dynamic typing, prototype-based object-orientation, and first-class functions. Alongside HTML and CSS, JavaScript is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web., or CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. developer or are just learning to code, Core would love to have you on board. You can write code, fix bugs, debate decisions, and help with development.
Core Performance: The core performance team is dedicated to monitoringMonitoring Website monitoring is the process of testing and verifying that end-users can interact with a website or web application as expected. Website monitoring is often used by businesses to ensure website uptime, performance, and functionality is as expected., enhancing, and promoting performance in WordPress core and its surrounding ecosystem.
CLI: WP-CLIWP-CLI WP CLI is the Command Line Interface for WordPress, used to do administrative and development tasks in a programmatic way. is the official command line tool for interacting with and managing your WordPress sites.
Documentation: Good documentation lets people help themselves when they get stuck. The docs team is responsible for creating documentation and is always on the look-out for writers. The blog has discussion around the team’s current projects.
Support: Answering a question in the support forums or IRC is one of the easiest ways to start contributing. Everyone knows the answer to something! This blog is the place for discussion of issues around support.
Test: The Test team patrols flow across the entire WordPress ecosystem on every device we have at hand. We test, document, and report on the WordPress user experience. Through continuous dogfooding and visual records, we understand not only what is wrong, but also what is right. We immerse ourselves in the context of what we are making and champion user experience.
Tide: Tide is a series of automated tests run against every plugin and themeTheme A theme dictates the style and function of your WordPress website. Child Themes derive from the main parent theme. in the directory and then displays PHP compatibility and test errors/warnings in the directory.
Training: The WordPress training team helps people learn to use, extend, and contribute to WordPress through synchronous and asynchronous learning as well as downloadable lesson plans for instructors to use in live environments, via learn.wordpress.org.

If you enjoy teaching people how to use and build stuff for WordPress, immediately stop what you’re doing and join our team!

Team Badges

The following are ways that a volunteer currently can earn a hosting contributor badge:

Accepted PRs to the distributed tests
Contributions to the documentation for best practices
Contributing with setting up automated tests at a host
Helping to lead meetings or write up notes
Actively participating in meetings regularly and giving feedback on things discussed.
Helping out at a contributor day

If you’ve contributed and don’t yet have a badge, apologies! Visit the Hosting Contributor page and submit a request with details on your contribution. Please feel free to pingPing The act of sending a very small amount of data to an end point. Ping is used in computer science to illicit a response from a target server to test it’s connection. Ping is also a term used by Slack users to @ someone or send them a direct message (DM). Users might say something along the lines of “Ping me when the meeting starts.” any of the Team Reps on Slack with questions.

If you’re interested in improving this handbook, check the Github Handbook repo, or leave a message in the #hosting channel of the official WordPress Slack.

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