WPML

WPML Site Keys – How They Work, When You Need One, How to Reset

A site key tells WPML which account a site belongs to. Most clients never need to touch keys directly. When a site is moved or copied, WPML reconnects it automatically and the key follows. The handful of cases where you do need to manage keys directly are below.

How Site Keys Work

Every site registered with WPML gets a unique site key tied to your WPML account. The key authorizes the site to use your account’s translation memory, glossary, and words allowance.

Your current site’s key is visible in two places:

  • WPML > Activate & Update. The registration banner shows a masked suffix (e.g., ******abcd) so you can identify which key the site is using without exposing the full key.
  • Your WPML.org account page. Lists every site you’ve registered and its full key.

To register a new site by hand, generate a key on your account page and paste it into the WPML admin when prompted: either in the Setup Wizard during onboarding, or in the embedded site-key form on the consolidated migration notice when WPML asks for it.

To unregister a site (e.g., because you’re decommissioning it), click Unregister WPML from this site in the WPML > Activate & Update registration banner. The same screen is where WPML installs and updates plugins – the sitekey there governs which account those downloads belong to.

Removing the “This Site Is Registered as a Development Site” Notice

A WPML account can register one development site per production site. The development site’s notice (“This site is registered on WPML.org as a development site”) appears on every WPML admin page on the dev site, intentionally, to keep development clones from being treated as production.

When you’re ready to switch a site from development to production:

  1. Open your WPML account and find the site in your registered sites list.
  2. Change its type from Development to Production.
  3. Save.
  4. On the site itself, open WPML > Activate & Update and click Check for updates. The dev-site notice disappears once the account-side change syncs.

If the notice persists after a sync, run WPML > Support > System check > Refresh license data. That clears the local license cache and re-fetches the account state.

Auto-Registering Sites via a PHP Constant

For automated dev/staging/prod workflows (where the site is deployed by a CI pipeline and there’s no human to paste a key), you can hardcode the site key in wp-config.php using PHP constants. WPML reads them during activation and registers the site without prompting.

In wp-config.php, before the “That’s all, stop editing!” line:

define( 'OTGS_INSTALLER_SITE_KEY_WPML', 'your-site-key-here' );

WPML picks up the constant when it activates and skips the registration prompt. The same key value can be set on dev, staging, and production environments. WPML separates them by domain.

This is the right approach for environments where:

  • The site is provisioned by Docker / Composer / WP-CLI scripts and there’s no manual setup step.
  • You’re managing many sites and want registration to be declarative, not a click-through.
  • The consolidated migration notice prompts for a key on a freshly deployed environment.