Connect Claude at claude.ai to your own WordPress site over the Model Context Protocol. Claude reaches your site through a custom connector: you paste one URL, sign in with the WordPress account you already have, and approve the connection. There is no config file, no Application Password, and nothing between Claude and your domain.
Free plugin · No account · Runs on your own server · Any WordPress host
Connection method
Custom connector in the browser
Authentication
OAuth sign-in on your own domain
Config file
None
Watch: Claude connector walkthrough
Before you start
You need AcrossAI MCP Manager installed and active on the WordPress site you want Claude to reach, plus an administrator account on that site. If you have not installed it yet, follow the Get Started guide first — it takes about a minute, and the official WordPress MCP Adapter ships bundled with the plugin, so there is nothing separate to install.
Because claude.ai runs in your browser rather than on your machine, your site has to be reachable from the public internet over HTTPS. There is no local bridge and no Node.js involved. The authorisation screen you sign in to is served by your WordPress install — the OAuth authorisation server runs on your own domain, not on AcrossAI servers. See Claude Connectors for how that works.
How to connect Claude to WordPress
Step 1
Install MCP Manager on your site
Install and activate AcrossAI MCP Manager from the plugin directory. It requires WordPress 7.0 or later and PHP 8.1 or later, and it brings the MCP server with it — there is no second plugin to hunt down.
Add Abilities Manager too if you want the full catalogue rather than the handful of abilities core registers.
Step 2
Enable the connector and copy its URL
In wp-admin go to AcrossAI → MCP, open the server you want to expose, and start Quick Connect. Choose Claude (claude.ai) from the client list. The wizard enables the browser connector on that server and shows you the URL to paste into Claude — no password is generated, because a connector does not use one.
While you are there, check the server’s access rules. A new server requires manage_options until you add a rule, and the gate fails closed — so an editor who is not covered by a rule will be refused even after signing in successfully.
Step 3
Add the custom connector in Claude
In claude.ai open Settings → Connectors, choose Add custom connector, give it a name you will recognise — your site’s name works well — and paste the URL from Quick Connect. That URL is your own MCP endpoint:
https://example.com/wp-json/acrossai/mcpPaste the whole URL including https://, with no trailing slash. If your site runs on a subdirectory install, keep the subdirectory in the path. There is no client ID or secret to enter — Claude registers itself with your site automatically.
Step 4
Sign in and approve the consent screen
Click Connect. Claude sends you to your own site to sign in — the same login you use for wp-admin — and shows a consent screen listing what the connector will be allowed to reach. Approve it and you are returned to Claude with the connector live. Ask something harmless to confirm it works: “Which plugins on this site need updating?” is a good first test.
If you are already logged in to WordPress in that browser, the sign-in step passes through and you go straight to the consent screen.
Want the one-click Claude connector?
AcrossAI Pro turns this setup into a managed one-click connector, with the controls a live site needs:
- See every connected client and revoke it in one click
- Require admin approval before anyone connects
- Gate tools by membership level across ten providers
What Claude can do once it is connected
With Abilities Manager installed alongside it, Claude reaches 350+ abilities across 14 toolsets — rising past 800 once it detects the plugins you already run. From an ordinary chat in your browser, with no editor and no terminal open, it can:
- Read and edit content — posts, pages and any custom post type with their meta and revisions, and surgically edit a page’s block tree without rewriting the page.
- Debug a broken site — read the debug log with secrets redacted, check Site Health, list recent fatal errors and un-pause what WordPress auto-disabled.
- Inspect the database — schema and table sizes, index health, bloated autoloaded options, or
EXPLAINon a slow query. - Manage plugins, themes and core — search WordPress.org, install, update, roll back, and verify files against official checksums.
- Work with files — inside an allowlist you define, with a dangerous-extension blocklist and optional pre-image backups of everything it touches.
- Reach the plugins you already run — WooCommerce, Elementor, ACF, Rank Math, Yoast, WPCode and more, each registering only when that plugin is active.
Every ability runs WordPress’s own capability check for the account you signed in with, so Claude can never do anything that account could not already do in wp-admin. See the full platform overview for the complete catalogue.
Frequently asked questions
Is connecting Claude to WordPress free?
Yes. AcrossAI MCP Manager and Abilities Manager are both free and GPL on WordPress.org, and there is no AcrossAI account to create. You use the Claude account you already have — AcrossAI never charges for AI inference, because none of it runs here.
Does my site data pass through AcrossAI servers?
No. The connector points at your own domain, and every request terminates at your /wp-json/ route. The OAuth authorisation server is your WordPress install too — the sign-in and consent screens are served by your site, and no token is ever held by us. There is no relay, no gateway and no telemetry. Whatever Claude reads is still processed by Anthropic as your AI provider, so treat it as you would any other prompt.
How is this different from Claude Desktop?
Claude Desktop is the installed app, and it connects through a local bridge configured in a JSON file with an Application Password. This page covers claude.ai in the browser, where the connection is a custom connector with an OAuth sign-in and no file to edit. The desktop app can reach a site that is not on the public internet; the browser connector cannot. See Connect Claude Desktop to WordPress.
Can I use this from Claude Code instead?
Yes, but it is a separate setup. Claude Code is the terminal client and registers the server with a command rather than a browser connector, so it uses an Application Password instead of OAuth. Connecting one does not connect the other. See Connect Claude Code to WordPress.
Can Claude break my site?
Every ability runs WordPress’s own capability check for the user who authorised the connector, so Claude can never exceed what that account can already do. Higher-risk operations refuse to run without an explicit confirmation flag, file access is confined to an allowlist you define, search-and-replace is a dry run by default, and any ability can be disallowed site-wide. To cut it off, remove the connector in Claude or revoke the authorisation in AcrossAI → MCP; access is re-checked on every request, so revoking takes effect immediately.
Troubleshooting
Claude will not accept the connector URL
Claude has to fetch the URL from its own servers before it will save the connector, so the address must be public and served over valid HTTPS. Paste the endpoint itself — /wp-json/acrossai/mcp — not your site’s home page and not /wp-admin/. Open the URL in a browser tab: if you get a 404, pretty permalinks or the REST API are disabled; if you get a 401, the endpoint is there and the connector will work.
The sign-in loops, or the consent screen returns an error
The OAuth round trip leaves your site and comes back to it, so anything that rewrites the address mid-flight will break it. Check that WordPress Address and Site Address in Settings → General match the domain you put in the connector, including www or its absence, and that the site is not redirecting HTTP to HTTPS only some of the time. A security plugin that blocks cookies on redirect, or an aggressive page cache in front of the login screen, will also strand the flow — exclude the authorisation route from caching.
A local or staging site will not connect
Expected. claude.ai runs in Anthropic’s infrastructure, so it cannot reach localhost, a .local domain, an IP-restricted staging box or a site behind HTTP authentication, and a self-signed certificate will be rejected outright. Either put the site behind a public HTTPS tunnel, or use Claude Desktop or Claude Code, which run on your machine and can reach it.
The connector is live but has no tools
That is the connection working and the catalogue being empty. Either Abilities Manager is not installed — MCP Manager will serve an empty catalogue quite happily — or the abilities exist but are not exposed to this particular server. Open AcrossAI → MCP, select the server, and check its Tools and Abilities tabs. After changing what a server exposes, disable and re-enable the connector in Claude: MCP clients receive their tool list once, at connection time.
It worked yesterday and stopped today
Access is re-checked on every request, not just when you authorised the connector. A change to your role, capability or membership takes effect immediately, and an authorisation granted yesterday does not keep working. If requests are being refused rather than failing, check the server’s access rules — a new server requires manage_options until you add a rule, and the gate fails closed.
Connect a different AI client
The same server works with every MCP client — only the way you point at it changes. See the guides for Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code, GitHub Copilot, Windsurf, Zed, Codex and every other client.
Not installed yet?
Install MCP Manager on your site, then come back and run Quick Connect.