Model Context Protocol · WordPress
WordPress MCP: let Claude or ChatGPT run your site
Three ways to do it, what each one costs you, and the one question worth asking before you install anything.
Check the SEO on my 12 newest posts.
Reading the live pages, not the database…
Average 88/100 across 12 posts.
Two things worth your time:
1. Eleven of twelve summaries are auto-generated.
Only one was written by hand.
2. Every headline runs 62–75 characters.
Google cuts off around 60, so the ending never shows.
Write proper summaries for all eleven.
Saved to All in One SEO. Checked the live page for each one.
11 of 11 now reach Google.
What is WordPress MCP?
MCP is the Model Context Protocol — an open standard that lets an AI assistant call tools on another system. WordPress MCP means exposing your site’s own functions as those tools, so an assistant like Claude or ChatGPT can create a post, fix a meta description or moderate a comment on your real site, rather than handing you text to paste in yourself.
The difference matters more than it sounds. Without MCP, an assistant writes you a blog post and the work starts: open wp-admin, paste, find an image, write the alt text, check the SEO plugin, publish. With MCP, the assistant does all of that itself and tells you when it is done.
WordPress got serious about this in 2026. The Abilities API arrived in WordPress 6.9, giving plugins a standard way to register what they can do, and the official MCP Adapter turns those abilities into MCP tools. Automattic maintains its own wordpress-mcp plugin alongside it.
Three routes
The three ways to run MCP on WordPress
They are genuinely different things, and most articles blur them together. Here is the honest version, including where ours is the wrong answer.
The official MCP plugin
Automattic’s wordpress-mcp plugin, installed on your site. Free, open source, and the closest thing to a reference implementation.
The catch: you install and update it on every site, generate tokens yourself, and connect each one to your assistant by hand. Fine for one site. Tedious for nine.
The MCP Adapter
The core route. WordPress 6.9’s Abilities API lets any plugin register what it can do; the MCP Adapter exposes those abilities as MCP tools.
The catch: it is a developer package, not a product. You are writing PHP, not asking for things in plain English. Right answer if you are building something.
A ready-made client
PressHand and WP Agent both sit between your assistant and your sites, with no plugin to install on any of them. You approve each connection inside your own wp-admin and never type a password or a token. PressHand runs on your own machine; WP Agent runs on theirs.
The catch: it costs money, and you are trusting somebody’s software. Worth it at the point where connecting sites by hand has become the job.
Which one should you use?
- One site, and you enjoy the plumbing. Install the official plugin. It is free and it works. Do not pay anybody.
- You are building a product on top of WordPress. The MCP Adapter and the Abilities API. Nothing else gives you that control.
- Several sites, and you want the work done rather than the setup. A ready-made client. This is where PressHand is meant to be the answer.
If you are weighing the two ready-made options, we wrote the comparison out in full, with their real prices: PressHand vs WP Agent.
Is WordPress MCP safe?
It can be, and the thing to check is how the connection is made. Any tool that asks you to paste your administrator password into a chat window, or into a textbox on someone else’s website, has already failed the test.
The safe pattern uses WordPress’s own Application Passwords. You are sent to your wp-admin, you press Approve, and WordPress mints a separate credential for that one app. Your real password is never involved, and you can revoke the credential yourself from Users → Profile without touching anything else.
Two more worth knowing. An assistant with MCP access can change your live site, so give it a site you have backups of. And whatever the tool reads — posts, comments, customer names — passes through whoever hosts the connector, which is a good reason to read the privacy page before you connect a client’s site.
Common questions
Do I need a plugin to use WordPress MCP?
Not always. The official MCP plugin and the MCP Adapter both run on your site, so they need installing. A ready-made client like PressHand connects through WordPress’s built-in Application Passwords instead, so plain WordPress is enough — a small helper plugin is only needed for custom CSS and for SEO on a site with no SEO plugin.
Does WordPress MCP work with ChatGPT as well as Claude?
Yes. MCP is an open standard, not an Anthropic-only feature, and any client that speaks it can connect — Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and others. PressHand’s desktop app is built around Claude today; run it on your own server and any MCP client can talk to it.
What does WordPress MCP cost?
The official plugin and the MCP Adapter are free and open source. Ready-made clients charge: WP Agent runs from free to $59 a month, with $10 a month for every site above your plan’s slots. PressHand is $97 once, for every site you own, with no per-site fee.
Can it publish posts, or only read them?
It can publish, edit, schedule, revert to an earlier version, set featured images, rewrite SEO titles and meta descriptions, build menus, moderate comments and install plugins. Whether a given tool does all of that depends on the tool — PressHand has 66 of these jobs.
Will it work on WordPress.com or Wix?
WordPress.com sites need a plan that allows plugins or Application Passwords; a free WordPress.com site will not work. Wix, Squarespace and Shopify are not WordPress, so nothing here applies to them.
MCP on every site you own, for one payment
No per-site fee, no monthly allowance to run out of, and the source code comes with it.