How to Connect Claude to WordPress with MCP, Step by Step

Most AI chats know nothing about your clients. You paste in an email, ask for a reply, and paste the answer back. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) fixes that by letting your AI app use tools inside your own systems, including WordPress.

This guide shows how to connect Claude (or ChatGPT, Cursor or another MCP client) to a WordPress site running Cliezoo, so the agent can work with your real clients, projects, tasks and invoices.

What you need

• A WordPress site with the Cliezoo plugin active
• The official WordPress MCP Adapter plugin, from WordPress.org
• An AI app that supports MCP, such as Claude Desktop

The MCP Adapter is what carries the conversation between your AI app and WordPress. Cliezoo adds its tools when the adapter is present, and does nothing when it isn’t.

Step 1: Turn on agent access

In your Cliezoo workspace, open Settings → External AI agents and switch on Let agents connect to this site.

Step 2: Give the agent its own user

Under Who the agent is, choose Make it its own user. Cliezoo creates a separate WordPress user for agents, with its own role and an application password.

The password is shown only once, so copy it somewhere safe before closing the dialog. A separate user means every change an agent makes is clearly attributed to the agent, not to you.

Step 3: Decide what the agent may do

Cliezoo groups its tools by risk:

• Looking at things: reading clients, projects, tasks and invoices. On by default.
• Writing things you can put right: safe changes such as drafts and tasks. On by default.
• Things that reach the outside world: sending and payments. Off by default.

You can also set safety limits, such as how many calls an agent may make per minute and how many records it may change in one call.

Step 4: Add the server to your AI app

The How to connect section in Cliezoo gives you a ready-made configuration to copy. For an agent that reaches your site over the internet, it looks like this:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "cliezoo": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@automattic/mcp-wordpress-remote@latest"],
      "env": {
        "WP_API_URL": "https://your-site.com/",
        "WP_API_USERNAME": "cliezoo-agent",
        "WP_API_PASSWORD": "your-application-password"
      }
    }
  }
}

Paste it into your AI app’s MCP settings (for Claude Desktop, that’s its configuration file), replace the address and password, and restart the app. If the agent runs on the same server as WordPress, Cliezoo also offers a local configuration through WP-CLI.

Step 5: Try it

Ask something only your workspace knows:

• “Which invoices are overdue, and for which clients?”
• “Summarise this week’s activity on the Website rebuild project.”
• “Create a task to send Bluebird Studio the final logo files by Friday.”

Read-only questions work straight away. Changes are made only with the tools you allowed in step 3.

Staying in control

Giving an AI agent access to client data is a real decision. Three habits keep it safe:

1. Start read-only. Leave writing tools off until you trust the answers.
2. Review the change log. What it has done lists every change an agent made.
3. Know the off switch. Disconnect every agent turns the server off and revokes the agent’s passwords in one click.

For more on choosing safeguards, see what agentic client management is and the full MCP setup guide in our docs.