Guide · Full cycle

Build a WordPress site with Claude. Publish it in one sentence.

This guide goes the whole way. You design the site with Claude in a local folder. Then one sentence publishes it to the server your WordPress runs on.

Before you start

What you need — and what it costs.

Three things, no surprises. We say up front which parts need a paid edition. So you can decide before you invest an afternoon.

Ordinary WordPress hosting. Shared hosting is fine. You need SFTP access; plain FTP and FTPS work only after you allow them in wp-config.php. 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 SFTP — is part of the Agency edition. Steps 1 and 2 work on the free plugin.

The walkthrough

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.

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 SFTP details in the plugin settings — they are encrypted with libsodium, and no tool returns them. Then run a connection test. To push, switch on write access at the top of the plugin settings; until then AlphaBridge only reads.

Publish

Ask Claude to push the folder atomically. Files travel in chunks and land in a staging directory. They get verified, and only then swap in. The previous version is kept as a backup.

In practice

What the conversation actually looks like.

Including the part where something goes wrong — because that is the part worth reading.

Claude— connected to your-site.com

Before we push anything: is the deploy connection actually pointing at my server?

wp_deploy_testConnected over SFTP. The host key matches the pinned fingerprint. A probe file confirms this is the same server your site runs on. ✓

Good. Push the site we built — all of it.

wp_deploy_push_zip · atomicUploaded in chunks and unpacked to a staging folder. All 214 files size-verified, previous version kept as backup. Swapped in one rename. Your site is live. ✓

The footer year is wrong. Fix just that file.

wp_deploy_push_filefooter.php replaced. Single-file pushes skip the staging dance — it was live in under a second. ✓

And if my connection had dropped halfway through the big push?

In atomic mode nothing would have changed on the live site. Files only swap in after every one is verified. An upload that stops before the swap leaves the staging folder behind. The live site stays as it was. A swap that fails is rolled back.

Worth knowing

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. Staging and swap cover files only. 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 switch on write access. That is friction on purpose.
Check the audit log. The settings page shows the latest tool calls with time, tool and status. After a long session, it is the fastest way to see what happened.

Site Deploy is part of Agency.

Get Agency: all 143 tools and Site Deploy on up to 10 sites. Or start with the free plugin for steps 1 and 2.

Get Agency — $299/year Or get the free plugin How Site Deploy works