How To: Connect Claude to WordPress with MCP (App, Desktop & Claude Code)

Claude can work directly on your WordPress site: write and publish posts, manage your media, run SEO audits, translate, by simply asking. The bridge is AI Engine‘s MCP server, and it’s free: no account, no daily cap and no API key (how it compares with WPVibe). 😊

There are three ways to connect, from one click to the terminal:

• The Claude app, in one click: AI Engine for WordPress is in Claude’s connector directory. Click Connect, sign in to your site, approve. It goes through our connector, which never stores your content.
• Claude Desktop or claude.ai, straight to your site: add a custom connector with your site’s MCP URL, sign in, approve. Nothing in between.
• Claude Code, in the terminal: run /mcp and approve in your browser, or use one command with a token. That’s what I use every day.

New to MCP? Start with the WordPress MCP guide. Using ChatGPT? See How To: Connect ChatGPT to WordPress with MCP. Hit “Couldn’t reach the MCP server” or the consent screen never loads? See Fix: MCP Connection Issues.

Connect Claude Desktop or claude.ai

1. Enable MCP on Your Site

MCP is on from the start in AI Engine (on an older install, turn it on in AI Engine → Modules). That’s the only switch you need for OAuth. You don’t have to set a Bearer Token: OAuth clients like Claude Desktop don’t use one. 😺

Later, you can turn on more tool sets in AI Engine → MCP → Tools: WordPress (on by default), Plugins, Themes, Polylang, WooCommerce, and so on.

2. Add the Connector in Claude Desktop

In Claude Desktop, open Settings → Customize → Connectors → Add → Add custom connector, give it a name (like My WordPress), and paste your site’s MCP URL. Even quicker: click Connect in AI Engine’s MCP tab, and its Open Claude, already filled in button does this for you.

https://example.com/wp-json/mcp/v1/http

Several sites? Add one connector per site and name each after its site (like WordPress: Offbeat Japan), so you always know which one the AI is working on.

3. Sign In and Approve

Claude Desktop opens your browser and sends you to your WordPress site. If you’re not already logged in, you’ll see WordPress’s normal login screen first (the standard wp-login.php page, nothing custom). Once you’re in, you’ll land on an approval screen showing which app is asking, who you’re signed in as, and what role you have on the site. Click Approve, and that’s it. 🎉

Claude Desktop now has access to your WordPress site through your own user account. Anything you can do in the admin, Claude can do too, scoped to your role.

Also works in Claude Cowork

Claude Cowork, Anthropic’s collaborative workspace tab that lives inside Claude Desktop, uses the same custom-connector system as Claude Desktop and claude.ai. The MCP connector you set up above shows up in Cowork automatically. No extra setup, no second OAuth flow. 🤝

This is true for any remote MCP server. Local stdio MCP servers (the kind configured in claude_desktop_config.json) are Desktop-only and don’t appear in Cowork, but AI Engine’s MCP is remote Streamable HTTP, so it’s right at home there.

Connect Claude Code

What is Claude Code?

Claude Code is Anthropic’s AI assistant that runs directly in your terminal. It reads files, writes code, executes commands, and with MCP it can now talk to your WordPress site too.

Think of it as a developer who also knows your entire WordPress. Need to analyze your traffic, create translated posts, schedule social media, or run an SEO audit? Just ask, in plain English.

Set it up in one command

In AI Engine → MCP, click Connect and pick Claude Code. The recommended way is Sign in: run /mcp in Claude Code and approve in your browser. Prefer a token? Choose Token instead: generate one, and the ready command is right under it.

Choose which tool sets to expose in AI Engine → MCP → Tools: WordPress core is on by default. You can also enable Plugins, Themes, Polylang (multilingual), and more.

If you haven’t already, install Claude Code first:

npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code

Then open your terminal and run one command to connect your site:

claude mcp add my-site https://mysite.com/wp-json/mcp/v1/http --transport http --header "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN"

If you prefer, you can include the token directly in the URL:

claude mcp add my-site https://mysite.com/wp-json/mcp/v1/YOUR_TOKEN --transport http

That’s it! Claude Code now has full access to your WordPress site.

Troubleshooting: If Claude Code doesn’t detect your MCP server, make sure you registered it using the claude mcp add command shown above. Manually editing config files (like ~/.claude/settings.json) is not enough: Claude Code needs the CLI command to properly register MCP servers.

What can Claude do on your site?

Short answer: everything. Posts, media, comments, users, taxonomies, settings, and that’s just WordPress core. Other Meow Apps plugins extend the MCP with their own tools: SEO Engine adds analytics, SEO audits, bot traffic monitoring, and more. Social Engine adds social media scheduling. Polylang support adds multilingual content management. And AI Engine itself adds AI image generation and vision analysis.

But the best way to show you is with real examples. The screenshots below come from real sessions: the analytics and SEO examples were tested on Offbeat Japan, a travel blog running AI Engine, SEO Engine, and Polylang.

Write a Post Like This One

Fun fact: the first version of this guide was written by Claude Code, connected to this WordPress site through MCP. It drafted the content, uploaded the screenshots, set the featured image, and published the post, all from the terminal. That’s the kind of thing you can do in a single conversation.

Analyze Your Best Content

With SEO Engine enabled, Claude Code can pull your analytics, rank your top-performing articles, break down traffic by country, and explain why certain posts outperform others.

Track Performance Over Time

Want to know how a specific article is trending? Claude Code pulls year-over-year data across multiple sites and languages, spots patterns, and tells you the story behind the numbers.

Translate and Schedule in Bulk

Running a multilingual site? With Polylang enabled, Claude Code finds articles missing translations, proposes a publishing schedule, creates the translations, and schedules them, all in one conversation.

Try These Prompts

Here are a few things you can say to Claude Code once it’s connected:

List my latest 5 posts.

Create a draft post about summer recipes, generate a featured image, and tag it.

Show me my top 10 articles this year and explain why they perform well.

Find all English posts missing French translations and create them.

Run a full SEO audit and tell me what needs fixing.

Schedule a tweet promoting my latest article for tomorrow morning.

Even better with SEO Engine

If you also have SEO Engine installed, Claude gets a whole new toolbox through the same MCP connection: visitor analytics, bot traffic, Google Search Console insights, and on-page SEO controls. Nothing extra to configure. As soon as SEO Engine is active, its tools show up alongside AI Engine’s. 🧠

This is where the combo really shines. Claude can now see who actually reads your site (real humans, Googlebot, Bingbot, ChatGPT, Perplexity, even Claude itself), where they come from, what they search for, and how each post performs. And it can act on what it finds: rewrite titles, improve meta descriptions, suggest internal links, score pages, plug orphan content back into your topic clusters. SEO Engine works with both Google Analytics and Plausible, so the same questions work no matter which one you use.

SEO things to try

• Visitor analytics: “Which 5 posts brought in the most traffic this month, and where did the visitors come from?”
• AI referrals: “Show me how many visitors ChatGPT and Perplexity sent me in the last 30 days, and which posts they landed on.”
• Bot mix: “Compare my AI bot traffic this month vs last month. Which crawlers grew the most?”
• Search Console: “List my top quick-win queries (page 2 rankings) and rewrite the titles to push them onto page 1.”
• SEO maintenance: “Scan my last 20 posts for missing SEO titles or excerpts, and fill in whatever’s empty.”
• Internal linking: “Find my orphan pages and suggest internal links from related posts that already exist.”
• Topic strategy: “Group my posts by topic, find the gaps, and propose 5 new articles I should write next.”

One assistant, one approval, full reach over content, SEO, and analytics. All from a chat window. 🚀

Keep Claude current on WordPress

Claude’s knowledge stops at its training date, so it may not know the newest WordPress release or this week’s security fix. Add Today WP as a second connector: a free MCP server we run that gives Claude current WordPress versions, security releases, what changed and the right docs. AI Engine lets Claude work on your site; Today WP keeps it up to date on WordPress itself.

Dig further

The examples above are just the beginning. Here’s a taste of everything you can do: create posts in bulk, translate them into multiple languages, schedule them weeks ahead, generate featured images from AI prompts, upload media from URLs, set alt text and captions automatically, run a full SEO audit across your entire site, find posts with missing meta descriptions, detect duplicate SEO titles, check your Core Web Vitals, preview your XML sitemap, fine-tune your robots.txt, compare traffic year-over-year, rank your top articles by country, monitor which AI bots crawl your content and how often, track which pages they prefer, moderate comments, create users, assign roles, manage categories and tags across hundreds of posts, update custom fields in bulk, schedule social media posts to Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn, fork a theme into a custom version, edit plugin files, install and activate new plugins, analyze images with AI vision, check your site’s PageSpeed score, find every article missing a translation, create the translations, link them to their source, and schedule publication dates across weeks. The only limit is what you ask for.

OAuth or Bearer token?

If you’re using a developer tool (like Claude Code, a script, or your own client), you can skip OAuth and use a Bearer Token instead. Generate one in AI Engine → MCP → Connect (pick Claude Code or Other, then Token), choose an Access Level (Admin, Read-Write, or Read-Only), and pass it as a standard Authorization: Bearer header. The Claude Code section above shows a concrete example.

	OAuth	Bearer token
For	Claude Desktop, Claude Cowork	Claude Code, scripts, your own client
Setup	Paste the URL, sign in, Approve	Generate a token in Connect (Claude Code or Other, then Token), send it as an Authorization: Bearer header
Access	Your WordPress user, scoped to your role	The Access Level you pick: Admin, Read-Write or Read-Only

MCP gives Claude full access to your WordPress through your account. It can create, modify, and delete content, plugins, themes, and settings. Start with a test site, and use it wisely on production! Every change it makes can be undone from AI Engine → MCP for 30 days, and deletions can wait for your approval.

Manage connections

In AI Engine → MCP, Connections lists every OAuth grant: which client, which WordPress user it’s tied to, when it was authorized, and when it was last used. One click revokes access. 🔒

Why it works so well

Claude Code lives in your terminal, right where you work. No browser tabs, no dashboard clicking: everything happens in one place through conversation.

And unlike raw REST API access, AI Engine can turn WordPress into an MCP server with optimized, AI-friendly tools: clear parameters, concise responses, and smart annotations that keep interactions safe and efficient.

MCP gives Claude Code full admin access to your WordPress site. It can create, modify, and delete anything: content, plugins, themes, settings. Start with a test site, and use it wisely on production!