Turn WordPress into an AI-Powered CMS with MCP + Claude Code

In this video, I'm going to show you how to set up the official WordPress MCP plug-in using Cloud Desktop. By the end, you'll have everything connected and running safely, ready to enhance your WordPress workflow. MCP stands for model context protocol. It's a new open standard that lets AI tools like clo securely interact with system like WordPress. It works through the WordPress REST API, meaning all actions like creating post or managing content go through secure permissionbased routes. The AI tool does not have direct access to your database. And if you wonder why would you use this? It's a new way to interact with everyday tools using natural language. You can simply say create a new blog post about WordPress web development and schedule it for tomorrow. Hey, welcome. In this video, I'm going to be using Claude's desktop application in order to connect to the WordPress MCP server. And the reason I'm using Claude is purely because I've already got a subscription with them for my coding purposes. And I do need to mention that if you wish to use Claude, you will need to be on the paid tier. So if you go to pricing overview, basically here you'll see that on the free version, you're not really able to connect to a remote MCP, just so you know. But if you're using another AI provider, then just make sure that you check their documentation and see whether you can do that. Anyways, I've already got the desktop application installed on my machine. And the next thing that we need is a WordPress website. Now, if you're going to be testing, I personally would suggest that you do it locally or on a website that you don't really care. So, you can just mess around and see what you can actually do with the command. Now, this video was sponsored by Cloudbase. So, I'm going to use their platform to set up a WordPress website super quickly and then I'm going to show you how we can install the WordPress MCP. So, a little bit about Cloudways. They're basically a simple, scalable, manage hosting provider that is perfect for agencies, developers, and business owners. They do give you a 3-day trial and there is no credit card required for this. So, give them a go. If you wish to, I'll put my link in the description below. And I'm going to login now. And from here, I'm going to click on this arrow here in the flexible. And then I'm going to go to servers and then create a new server. This server is going to have a WordPress application. We can choose a name. I'm going to put radi like so. Let's put the same thing for the server name as well. And then for the select project, I'm going to leave it as default. This is something that I've done previously. Anyways, for the application stack, you can choose between the hardware stack or the lightning stack. The lightning stack is currently in public preview, but it's supposed to be a fast and simple engine X setup with caching for speed and built-in security. So, I'll go with that. Then, I'm going to go with Voter, but you can basically choose any of these servers that you wish. Have a look at the pricing and also have a look at the server type, availability, and the location because they're all slightly different. So, if I click on this one, you'll see that some of the options disappear and so on. So, I'm going to go with voter. I'm going to go high frequency. I'm going to go 2 GB and I'm going to put location to be uh London because this is the closest to me. Once you're done with the setup, click launch now. Let's keep this. And it should take roughly 30 minutes for your server and application to set up. Now, I've already got one running here. So, we might as well use this one instead of waiting 30 minutes. But essentially, I have another web server that I created earlier which has a WordPress application. So if I go under applications, you'll see my application here. You should be able to click on it and then from here you'll be able to see some of the stuff that you can do like have a look at your application security. You can set up a custom domain name and so on. Now in this case, Cloudways gives us a URL that we can use straight away. So I can click on it and our WordPress website as you can see is working. Now let's log into a WordPress website. So, I'm going to put /wpadmin. And then if we go back to the admin panel here, I'm going to copy the username. Paste it. I'm going to copy the password. Paste it. Click remember me and log in. Awesome. Let's dismiss some of those messages. And let's go to plugins. And now we need to install the the WordPress MPC plug-in. If you go to github.com/automatic/wordpress-mcp, this is the official plug-in and you can download the latest release from here. Just click on releases. Scroll down a little bit and you'll be able to see the zip file somewhere around here. Here it is. WordPress-mcip. Download this. And here it is in my downloads folder now. And now if I go back to my WordPress website, I should be able to add a new plug-in. Upload plugin. Choose file and select the WordPress-mc zip file. Install now and make sure that you activate the plug-in. And that's it. All plugins should be working. And if you go to settings, MCP at the bottom, you should be able to see some of the settings. In order to enable it, toggle this one here, enable MCP functionality. And you can enable some of the other features if you wish to. For example, I will enable the enable create tools and enable update tools. And if you wish to, you can even delete stuff. This might be dangerous. So, it's really up to you if you want to experiment with those, too. The next thing that we need to do is to connect our MCP to the claw desktop application. In order to do this, we need a token. So, let's click on the second tab here, authentication token, and let's create one. So, here you can put the duration. I'm going to put 24 hours which is 1 day and then generate new token and this will give me the token which I can use in the CLA desktop application. Okay, the last thing that we need to do is to connect CL with the WordPress MCP. And in order to do this, uh, we need to go back to the official GitHub repo. And if you scroll down a little bit, you should be able to see some of the installation guide here. And we have one for the CLA desktop. And basically, we need to copy this code. And if we open CLA, the application. And now if you go to the hamburger menu here on the top left corner, file settings. And then if you click on developer, I'm going to remove this just because this was something I was testing with. And now I'm going to click edit config. And we need to edit the CL desktop_config.json file. You can open this in Visual Studio Code or whatever code editor you have available. And then you can just replace everything inside here with the new code. We do need to replace the URL. Add the token. The token it's already created here. So I'm going to just copy it. I had to generate new one because my internet went down. But I'm going to paste in here. And then we need to also put the URL. So I'm going to go and grab the URL which is this one here. So this is the URL of your website. paste it inside here and save it. Once you save this, make sure you close it. And if you go back to clothes, you probably won't see any difference here. But what I had to do is to actually close it from here. Make sure that you fully stop it. So, so I'm going to quit from here as well. And now if I do cloud and if we again go back to the settings so hamburger menu file settings and then if we go to developer here you'll be able to see your new connection and if you click on advanced option you'll be able to see the WP API URL in here that we just added and my token as well and now we should be able to start using it. So, I'm going to open a new chat and let's say what is is the title of my WordPress website and it says the title of your WordPress website is basically the URL. And if I go to my website and if I click on general, you'll be able to see that this is correct. This is the the site title. But if I wanted to change it, I can just say, can you update the title to ready? Press enter. Let's have a look. Perfect. Successfully updated there. And if you go back and if I refresh the page, you'll be able to see that the title is now changed. And just like that, you can do all sorts of uh different operations. Pretty much anything that you can do from here, you can do from the chat, which is great. And let's do one more. Maybe let's create a new post and a new category. So, I'm going to say write a new post called everything you need to know about WordPress FSE development like so. And add a category as FSE and FSE stands for full site editing. by the way if people are not familiar. But as you can see here, this is creating the category already. I'm going to allow it. And now hopefully this is going to generate an article for us as well. We'll have a look in a second. Here we go. It's generating a post. All right, it says that it's generated the post for us. And it's actually giving me the link with the slug here, which is awesome. So, I should be able to copy this and paste in the browser. And here is the article, everything you need to know about WordPress full site editing development. And it's actually done a little intro here. What is full site editing key components? That's pretty cool. I mean, yeah, that's really good. So as you can see it's created this article for us and if you have a look you will see that this is also put in the FSE category which means that it's created the category for us. So if I was to refresh here you will see the new article and the category and so on. So just like that you can edit this article you can create more and you can control your WordPress uh instance like so that's going to be everything from this video. I hope that you liked it. I hope that you found it useful. Consider liking this video and subscribing to my channel. And hopefully I'll see you in the next one. Thank you very much for watching. Bye.