Setup guide
Connect WordPress to Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or any AI
Turn your site into a self-hosted WordPress MCP server in about a minute. Install MCP Manager first — the MCP server comes bundled with it — then run Quick Connect and pick your assistant. Nothing leaves your server.
Runs on your own server · Bring your own AI · Any WordPress host
What you need before you start
A WordPress site
WordPress 7.0 or later and PHP 8.1 or later, with an administrator account. Shared hosting, VPS and managed WordPress all work — if you can reach wp-admin, you’re fine.
An AI you already use
Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini, Grok, Copilot — any MCP-capable client. Their free plans work. You never pay AcrossAI for AI inference, because none of it runs here.
Nothing else
No account to create, no API key to paste, no service to sign up for. The official WordPress MCP Adapter ships inside MCP Manager, so there is no second download.
How to set up your WordPress MCP server in three steps
The order matters. Install the server first, let Quick Connect walk you through connecting your assistant, then narrow down what it is allowed to touch.
Step 1
Install MCP Manager
Start here. In wp-admin go to Plugins → Add New, search for AcrossAI MCP Manager, then Install and Activate — or install it straight from WordPress.org. On activation you already have a working MCP server at /wp-json/mcp/mcp-adapter-default-server, reachable by administrators only. The official WordPress MCP Adapter is bundled, so there is nothing else to fetch.
Why first? MCP Manager is what an AI actually connects to. Install it before anything else and every later step has somewhere to land.
Step 2
Run Quick Connect
In wp-admin open AcrossAI → MCP and start Quick Connect. It guides you through connecting your AI one screen at a time: pick the assistant you use and choose the recommended option whenever it offers one. It generates a WordPress Application Password for you and hands back configuration already filled in for your site — ready to paste, nothing to work out.
Sixteen clients have guides built in, including Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code, GitHub Copilot and Codex. Prefer the terminal? Sign in from the CLI and approve it in your browser. Working locally? Connect over WP-CLI STDIO, where no credential crosses the network at all.
Note: Quick Connect will ask you to install Abilities Manager — please do. It’s free and gives your AI 350+ abilities for posts, media, users, plugins and settings, plus the plugins you already run, like WooCommerce and Elementor. See all integrations →
Step 3
Choose what your AI can access
You are connected — now tighten it. Every ability runs WordPress’s own capability check, and a new server is administrator-only until you say otherwise, so you are already safe by default. From there, review each ability’s slug and schema exactly as the AI sees it, allow or disallow any of them site-wide, and curate which tools each server advertises.
A common setup: one full server for yourself, one read-only server for a client or a colleague.
What to ask your AI first
Safe, read-mostly requests that prove the connection is live.
- “Which plugins on this site need updating?”
- “Are any scheduled tasks overdue, and is WP-Cron actually firing?”
- “Summarise my ten most recent posts and suggest tags for the untagged ones.”
- “Find internal links on this site that point at missing or unpublished posts.”
- “Run Site Health and tell me what is worth fixing first.”
- “Draft a page about our pricing — leave it as a draft.”
Troubleshooting your WordPress MCP setup
My AI connects, but sees no tools
Almost always one of two things. Either Abilities Manager is not installed — MCP Manager will happily serve an empty catalogue — or the abilities exist but are not exposed to that server. Open AcrossAI → MCP, pick the server, and check its Tools and Abilities tabs. Remember your client is handed its tool list once, at connection time: after changing what a server exposes, reconnect the client so it picks the new list up.
The client cannot authenticate
Application Passwords are shown once, at creation, and are not the password you log in with. Generate a fresh one from Quick Connect rather than retyping an old one, and copy it whole including the spaces. If a connection is being refused rather than failing, check the server’s access rules — a new server is manage_options-only until you add a rule, and the gate fails closed. CLI sign-in attempts are recorded per server, so you can see whether the request arrived at all.
It worked yesterday and stopped today
Access is re-checked on every request, not just at setup, so a change to a user’s role, capability or membership takes effect immediately — an existing saved configuration does not keep working. Revoking an Application Password has the same effect. Both are deliberate.
Which plugin do I install if I only want one?
It depends what you are after. Want an AI assistant to operate your site? Install MCP Manager first — it is the part an AI connects to — then add Abilities Manager so there is something worth calling. Only want the actions, reachable over the REST API by your own code? Abilities Manager alone is enough; it works without any MCP server at all.
Can I undo what the AI did?
Posts and pages keep WordPress revisions as normal. For files, the File Manager can be set to write a pre-image backup of every file it touches and append an entry to a changelog recording what changed, when, and the context the assistant gave — both are toggles, and the changelog is readable back through an ability. Higher-risk operations refuse to run without an explicit confirmation flag, and search-and-replace is a dry run unless you say otherwise.
Start with step one
Install MCP Manager, then come back and run Quick Connect.
Runs on your own server · Bring your own AI · Any WordPress host