The Model Context Protocol (MCP) gives Claude direct read and write access to your WordPress site. Instead of copying and pasting content between Claude and your WordPress dashboard, you can instruct Claude to create posts, update media, set SEO fields, manage categories, and publish – all from a single conversation.
This guide covers two setups: WordPress.com sites using the native WordPress.com MCP connector, and self-hosted WordPress sites using a plugin-based MCP server.
What MCP does
MCP is an open standard that lets AI models connect to external tools and data sources through a single protocol. For WordPress, it means Claude can call the WordPress REST API on your behalf – authenticated, structured, and without you needing to touch the dashboard for routine publishing tasks.
Once connected, Claude can create and update posts and pages, set featured images by attachment ID, write Yoast SEO fields, apply categories and tags, schedule posts, query the media library, and update image alt text and captions.
Option 1: WordPress.com sites
If your site is hosted on WordPress.com, the MCP connector is built in and requires no plugin installation.
Steps
- Open Claude.ai and go to Settings.
- Navigate to the Integrations or Connectors section.
- Find WordPress.com in the list and click Connect.
- Authenticate with your WordPress.com account.
- Once connected, Claude can query and write to any WordPress.com site your account has access to.
In conversation, reference your site by its URL or numeric site ID. Claude uses the WordPress.com REST API layer, which supports posts, pages, media, taxonomy, and meta fields including Jetpack SEO fields.
Option 2: Self-hosted WordPress sites
Self-hosted WordPress requires an MCP server plugin that exposes your site’s REST API to Claude through an authenticated endpoint.
Steps
- Install an MCP server plugin on your WordPress site. Easy MCP AI is one option that generates a unique authenticated endpoint URL.
- In Claude.ai Settings, go to Integrations and add a custom MCP server using the URL generated by the plugin.
- Save the connection. Claude will now have access to the tools exposed by the plugin.
The plugin controls which WordPress operations Claude can perform. Most implementations expose post creation and update, media library queries, and meta field writes. Custom plugins can extend this to additional REST endpoints.
SEO fields
Standard Yoast SEO fields (focus keyphrase, SEO title, meta description) are not part of the default WordPress REST API. To make them writable via MCP, they need to be registered as REST fields using register_rest_field() in your theme’s functions.php or a custom plugin. Once registered, Claude can pass them as top-level fields in post creation and update calls.
What a working MCP workflow looks like
A typical session: you brief Claude on an article topic, Claude researches it, writes the HTML content, looks up the featured image attachment ID in your media library, sets alt text, builds the SEO fields, assigns categories, and creates the post as a draft or publishes it directly – all in one conversation, with no manual steps in the dashboard.
For sites producing regular content, the time saving is substantial. The value is not in any single task but in removing the context-switching between research, writing, and publishing entirely.
Limitations
MCP access is as powerful as the account it authenticates with. An editor-level connection cannot perform actions requiring administrator permissions. Media uploads via MCP are supported but impractical for large images due to base64 encoding size constraints – uploading directly to the WordPress media library and referencing the attachment ID in Claude is faster. MCP also has no access to the WordPress admin interface itself; it operates purely through the REST API.