The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that lets AI assistants connect to external tools and take real actions. WordPress MCP lets Claude — or ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini — read your posts, create drafts, manage categories, and operate your site through natural language. This is the bridge from “AI that gives advice” to “AI that does things for you.”
Why MCP changes everything
Until now in this program, you’ve been copying and pasting between AI chat windows and WordPress. MCP eliminates that friction. When Claude is connected to your site via MCP, you can say “read my last 10 posts and draft a newsletter” and it reads the actual posts from your database, understands your content, and generates output that includes your real URLs and article details. No copy-pasting, no context loss.
MCP works through the Abilities API you’ll learn about on Day 6 — your site’s registered capabilities become tools that AI agents can discover and invoke.
Setup: Choose your path
Path A: WordPress.com sites (easiest)
- Install the Claude desktop app from claude.ai/download.
- Open Claude Desktop → click your profile icon → Settings.
- Click the Connectors tab → Browse connectors.
- Search for “WordPress.com” and select the official connector.
- Click Connect and authorize via OAuth. Done — Claude can now read your WordPress.com site. Write tools (creating and editing posts) stay off until you explicitly enable them in the connector settings — a deliberate safety default, so switch them on when your team is ready.
Path B: Self-hosted / WordPress sites
- Install the mcp-adapter plugin on your WordPress site (download from GitHub, upload as plugin).
- Set up @automattic/mcp-wordpress-remote as a local proxy — this bridges your local AI client to the remote WordPress site.
- Configure authentication using Application Passwords (Settings → Users → your profile → Application Passwords in WordPress admin) or JWT tokens.
- Follow the detailed setup guide for your specific configuration.
Stuck on setup? Take a screenshot of whatever you’re seeing and paste it into a Claude browser chat with: “I’m trying to set up WordPress MCP to connect Claude Desktop to my WordPress site. Here’s what I see — what should I do?” The screenshot-and-ask technique from Day 1 works perfectly here.
💡 Operating rules: Connect MCP to a test site first, create drafts before publishing, review every AI-generated change, and avoid bulk updates on production until you have a backup or rollback plan. The power move is safe iteration, not surprise automation.
🔓 No key or cannot install? Do this instead. No paid WordPress.com plan, or cannot install Claude Desktop? Use the copy-paste path: run the AI step in Claude.ai (free), paste your content in, and paste the result back into WordPress yourself. You lose automatic writing to the site, but keep the whole lesson.
Test the connection
Once connected, try these prompts in Claude Desktop to verify everything works:
Test 1: Read your site
List all published posts on my WordPress site. Show me the title, date, and category for each one.If Claude returns your actual posts, MCP is working. It just read your WordPress database through the Abilities API.
Test 2: Create a draft
Create a new draft post titled "Testing AI Integration" with a short paragraph about how our editorial team is exploring AI tools for WordPress. Set the category to "Technology". Don't publish it — just save as draft.Go to your WordPress admin → Posts. You should see the draft. Claude just created a real post in your CMS. Open it — the content is there, the category is set, it’s saved as a draft exactly as requested.
Test 3: Ask a question about your content
What topics do we write about most on this site? Look at the last 20 published posts and give me a breakdown by category and theme.This is where MCP becomes powerful for editorial teams — Claude can analyze your actual content, not hypothetical content. The insights come from your real publishing data.
TOOL: WORDPRESS MCP
MCP connects AI agents to WordPress through the Abilities API. Supports Claude Desktop, ChatGPT, Cursor, VS Code, and Gemini. WordPress.com has built-in OAuth; self-hosted uses the mcp-adapter plugin + local proxy. Key repos: mcp-adapter | mcp-wordpress-remote | Setup guide
KEY TAKEAWAY
MCP is the bridge from “AI that gives advice” to “AI that takes action on your site.” Once connected, Claude can read and write to WordPress directly — no copy-pasting, no context loss. This is the foundation for everything in Weeks 2-4.