I spent about five minutes connecting Claude directly to my WordPress site this morning. No plugin. No middleware. No Zapier. Just two things WordPress and Claude already had sitting there, waiting.
If you’ve been wondering whether you can get Claude to read, draft, edit, or post to your site without engineering anything, the answer is yes — and the path is shorter than you’d think.
Here’s the whole trick.
The 30-second version
WordPress has a feature most people ignore called Application Passwords. They let an external tool — including an AI — talk to your site over the REST API without you handing over your real login. You generate one, paste it into Claude, and Claude can now read your posts, create drafts, edit pages, whatever your user account is allowed to do.
That’s the connection. That’s it.
Step 1: Generate an application password
Log into your WordPress site. Go to Users → Profile and scroll right to the bottom. You’ll find a section called Application Passwords.
Type a name like “Claude” and click Add. WordPress will show you a one-time password that looks something like this:
4CHt b6qO l7ox SU8l qcaU cOYj
Copy it. A few things worth knowing:
- The password only shows once. Lose it and you just delete it and make a new one.
- You can revoke it any time from the same screen. Five seconds of work.
- It’s scoped to that user’s permissions. If the account is an editor, that’s what the password can do.
Step 2: Tell Claude
Open Claude. In a Cowork session (where Claude has shell access), say something like:
Here’s my WordPress username and application password. Can you list my last 10 posts? The site is example.com.
Behind the scenes, Claude hits https://example.com/wp-json/wp/v2/posts with your credentials and pulls back whatever it has permission to see. From there you can ask it to:
- Pull a specific post and rewrite the intro
- Draft a new post and save it as a draft (not published — important)
- Update tags or categories on existing posts
- Show you everything you wrote last month, sorted by comments
The first time you do this it feels a bit like magic. It isn’t — it’s a 20-year-old API doing exactly what it was built to do — but the experience is new because the thing on the other end can actually think about your content.
Step 3: Make it repeatable with an artifact
The bit I like most: once Claude can talk to your site, you can ask it to build you a little tool — an artifact — that lives in the Claude sidebar and stays useful.
Mine is a writing pad. Drafts saved locally. Buttons that polish a paragraph in my voice, generate title options, suggest a stronger opener. One click to copy the post as HTML, paste straight into the WordPress editor.
You can ask Claude to build whatever fits your workflow:
- A content calendar that reads your scheduled posts every morning
- A weekly report of what’s getting the most comments
- A draft generator that pulls from a notes folder and pitches three angles
- A dashboard of every post tagged “AI” so you can see what’s working
You describe what you want. Claude builds the page. It lives in your sidebar.
A safety note worth one sentence
Treat application passwords like credentials — don’t share them in places you can’t revoke them from — and if you do, just delete the password and make a new one. The revoke button is right there. The worst case is genuinely a five-second fix.
The bigger point
The interesting thing isn’t that Claude can post to WordPress. It’s that WordPress’s REST API has been sitting there for years, useful and underused, and AI is the thing that finally makes it casually accessible to people who don’t want to write Python.
If you can describe what you want, you have a WordPress integration now. No plugin marketplace. No JSON. No webhooks page.
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