Build it locally with Claude. Put it live in one sentence.
Most AI website tools stop where the real work begins: getting the thing onto hosting you actually control. This walkthrough goes the whole way — design the site locally with Claude, then publish it to your own server in a single step, with a safety net under every file.
What you need — and what it costs.
Three things, no surprises. We say up front which parts need a paid plan, so you can decide before you invest an afternoon.
- Ordinary WordPress hosting. Shared hosting is fine. You need FTP or SFTP access — the same credentials you would use with any FTP client. PHP 8.0+, WordPress 6.5+.
- Claude. claude.ai, Claude Desktop or Claude Code — anything that can add an MCP server.
- AlphaBridge MCP. The free plugin covers content, media, taxonomies and settings. Site Deploy — pushing whole sites over FTP/SFTP — is part of the Agency plan. Everything up to step 3 works on the free tier.
Four steps from empty folder to live site.
Build it locally
Describe what you want. Claude writes the theme, pages and styles into a local folder — and you keep iterating until it looks right. Nothing is online yet, so nothing can break.
Connect the site
Install the plugin on your WordPress site, create a connection, and add the endpoint /wp-json/alphabridge/v1/mcp to Claude. With OAuth you just click Connect and approve on your own login screen.
Store credentials, verify the target
Enter your FTP/SFTP details in the plugin settings — they are encrypted with libsodium and are never readable back through MCP. Then run a connection test.
Publish
Ask Claude to push the folder. Files travel in chunks, land in a staging directory, get verified, and only then swap in — with the previous version kept as a backup.
What the conversation actually looks like.
Including the part where something goes wrong — because that is the part worth reading.
Where the safety net ends.
A guide that only lists the happy path is not a guide. Four things to keep in mind.
- Atomic means file deploys. The staging-and-swap guarantee covers files. A release that also changes the database is a different kind of operation — take a database backup first, as you would with any migration.
- The AI works as a real user. Every call runs with the WordPress permissions of the connected user. If you want a narrower blast radius, create a scoped connection instead of using an admin one.
- Deploy is deliberately off by default. Nothing can be pushed until you enter credentials and enable the deploy tool group. That is friction on purpose.
- Check the audit log. Every tool call is recorded — who, what, when, allowed or denied. After a long session it is the fastest way to see what actually happened.
Start with the free plugin.
Content, media and settings by conversation cost nothing — install it and see whether the workflow suits you. Site Deploy is there when you need it.
Get it free on WordPress.org How Site Deploy works