How to Connect Claude to WordPress: 5 Ways That Work in 2026

Connecting Claude to WordPress means giving it an MCP server to talk to. Whichever route you take, have these ready:

• A Claude client that speaks MCP. In claude.ai and Claude Desktop, remote servers are added as custom connectors under Settings → Connectors. Anthropic lists custom connectors on Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise, and Free accounts can add one. In Claude Code, servers are added from the terminal with claude mcp add.
• An admin account on the site, plus ideally a second, dedicated WordPress user for the agent with only the capabilities it needs.
• A staging copy for the first few tasks. An agent acts on whatever it is pointed at.
• WordPress 6.9 or later if you plan to use the official MCP Adapter.

This is the shortest path if your site is on WordPress.com or already runs Jetpack. WordPress.com operates a hosted MCP server with OAuth 2.1 sign-in, and its documentation says self-hosted sites connected through Jetpack use the same server and tool catalogue.

1. Turn on MCP access in your WordPress.com account settings at my.wordpress.com/me/preferences/mcp and choose which tools to allow. Full access turns on every read and write tool; Read only turns off every write tool.
2. In claude.ai or Claude Desktop, open Settings → Connectors, choose Add custom connector and paste https://public-api.wordpress.com/wpcom/v2/mcp/v1. WordPress.com is also listed in Claude’s connector directory.
3. Sign in to WordPress.com when prompted. There is no password to paste, and you can turn access off again from your account.
4. Start with a read-only question, such as which posts had the fewest views last month, before you ask for changes.

In Claude Code, add the same server with:

claude mcp add --transport http wordpress-com https://public-api.wordpress.com/wpcom/v2/mcp/v1

then run /mcp inside Claude Code to sign in. The connector launched read-only in February 2026; WordPress.com’s documentation now lists write tools as well, so check which ones you have switched on.

The MCP Adapter is the WordPress project’s own bridge between the Abilities API and MCP. It needs WordPress 6.9 or later and PHP 7.4 or later, and it only exposes abilities a developer has marked public, so what Claude can do depends on the plugins you run.

1. Install and activate MCP Adapter from the WordPress.org plugin directory.
2. Check what will be exposed. Core ships a few read-only abilities, such as site, user and environment information, and plugins add their own. Clients find them through the default server’s mcp-adapter/discover-abilities tool.
3. Connect the client. The adapter’s guide documents two ways, below.

Local site: STDIO through WP-CLI

Claude Desktop starts the server itself, so WP-CLI must be installed on the same machine as the site. Add this to claude_desktop_config.json with your own path, and replace admin with the agent’s user:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "wordpress": {
      "command": "wp",
      "args": [
        "--path=/path/to/your/wordpress/site",
        "mcp-adapter",
        "serve",
        "--server=mcp-adapter-default-server",
        "--user=admin"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Hosted site: application password through the remote proxy

Create an application password for the agent’s user under Users → Profile → Application Passwords, then point Automattic’s proxy at the site’s MCP endpoint:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "wordpress": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@automattic/mcp-wordpress-remote@latest"],
      "env": {
        "WP_API_URL": "https://your-site.com/wp-json/mcp/mcp-adapter-default-server",
        "WP_API_USERNAME": "agent-user",
        "WP_API_PASSWORD": "your-application-password"
      }
    }
  }
}

In Claude Code, the equivalent is:

claude mcp add --transport stdio \
  --env WP_API_URL=https://your-site.com/wp-json/mcp/mcp-adapter-default-server \
  --env WP_API_USERNAME=agent-user \
  --env WP_API_PASSWORD=your-application-password \
  wordpress -- npx -y @automattic/mcp-wordpress-remote@latest

Keep application passwords out of shared files: anyone with the config can act as that user.

If you want broad tools today without writing abilities, an MCP plugin is the fastest route. The most-installed options on WordPress.org on 30 October 2026 were WPVibe by SeedProd (100,000+ active installs), AI Engine by Meow Apps (90,000+), Easy MCP AI by Themeisle (30,000+), Royal MCP (10,000+) and miniOrange’s Secure MCP Server (8,000+).

The pattern is the same for all of them: install and activate the plugin, copy the connection URL or key it generates, and add it to Claude as a custom connector or with claude mcp add. What differs is the toolset, how authentication works (OAuth, application passwords or keys the plugin issues) and the guardrails, such as approvals, read-only modes, undo and audit logs. Follow each plugin’s own setup guide for the exact steps, and see our comparison of WordPress MCP plugins for the trade-offs.

Most general-purpose MCP tools work at the level of posts, pages and settings; building page-builder layouts is a different job. For sites on Elementor 4, Elementor Ultra, an open-source project from the WPOS team, gives Claude Code about 90 Elementor-specific tools covering pages, widgets, global classes, variables, media, forms and rollback, plus a compiler that turns a typed JSX file into a native, editable Elementor page.

The quickest route is its Claude Code plugin. Inside Claude Code, run:

/plugin marketplace add Algorismus-io/claude-plugin-elementor
/plugin install elementor@algorismus

It needs a WordPress site with an application password and Elementor; the project is tested on Elementor 4.1.4 and 4.2.0. To try it without touching a real site, npx @algorismus/elementor-ultra-playground starts a local WordPress with Elementor already installed. The tooling is MIT-licensed and the companion WordPress plugin is GPL. Full steps are in the Elementor Ultra quickstart.

WPOS speaks MCP, so your own agent can work on the sites in your WPOS workspace. Claude Code, Cursor, Codex or an agent you wrote yourself can drive the same tools WPOS’s built-in agent uses: building and editing pages natively in Gutenberg, Elementor or Divi, widgets and themes, media, users, SEO metadata and schema, WooCommerce through its own APIs, and read-only inspection through queries, file reads and a log tail. A bad change can be undone with per-page backups and widget revisions.

The WPOS plugin stays on each site, because it is what exposes the tools, and each site’s content stays in its own database on its own host. Driving a site from your own agent doesn’t spend WPOS credits: you pay your own model provider, and you license the sites you publish as usual.

WPOS is our product, so weigh this section accordingly. To set it up, start free and book a free 30-minute call with the founders to connect your MCP client to your first site.

• Connect as a dedicated user with only the capabilities the job needs, not as yourself.
• Start read-only. Turn on write tools once you have seen what the agent reaches for.
• Use credentials you can revoke, such as OAuth or an application password, and remove them when a project ends.
• Try new kinds of task on staging before you run them on a live site.
• Keep a backup you have actually restored from, and know how long a rollback takes.
• Keep a person approving anything a client or customer will see.

Everything above connects one Claude account to sites you can reach. Agencies usually need more than that. With a client book you also need every site in one place, builds that land natively in Gutenberg, Elementor or Divi, your team’s conventions applied on each site, a check that the result renders before anyone calls it done, and a handoff clients see under your brand. That is what WPOS adds for agencies, whether your team works through its built-in agent or drives the sites from Claude Code, Cursor or Codex.

You can try WPOS free for 30 days with 5,000 credits, a live site plus a staging sandbox, and no card, or book a call with the founders.