Letting Claude maintain WordPress sites without giving it SSH access

pressbridgesupport — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 07:48:37 +0000

I look after WordPress sites for a living, and lately I've wanted Claude to take over the boring parts: find where a piece of text lives in a theme, fix it, check which plugins need updates, write the monthly care report for the client.

The two obvious ways to do that both felt wrong:

Give the AI an SSH key. It sees everything, including wp-config.php and the database password, and one bad instruction can wipe a client's site.
Copy and paste files into a chat. Safe, but slow, and the AI never sees the whole theme.

So I built something in between: PressBridge, a self-hosted MCP server that sits between Claude and the WordPress site. Claude gets useful tools; the server decides what those tools are allowed to do.

The server enforces the rules, not the prompt

A prompt like "never read wp-config.php" is a suggestion. A file that is invisible to the tool is a guarantee. That was the main design rule: every limit is checked by PressBridge before anything runs, so text hidden in a plugin readme or a web page can't talk Claude past it.

In the free edition, Claude can:

read, list and search theme and plugin files
run read-only WP-CLI commands: versions, plugin and theme lists, core checksums, cron, users
call site_overview to get the WordPress version and pending updates in one call

And it can't:

see wp-config.php, .env, SQL dumps, keys or .git, at any folder depth
reach anything outside the site folder, symlink tricks included
open a shell or run arbitrary commands

It connects over SSH, so nothing is exposed to the internet.

A real session

Here's a 70-second recording of a real session on a test site: health overview, creating and editing a file with an automatic backup, a one-call undo, a safe delete and the audit log.

Try it

The free edition is MIT-licensed on GitHub, for one site, read-only: https://github.com/pressbridgesupport/pressbridge

Install takes about five minutes on any Linux server where you have SSH: a Python venv, WP-CLI, and a small YAML file listing your site. Then add it to Claude Code or Claude Desktop and ask: "Give me a health overview of mysite."

If you want Claude to fix things too

I also sell a paid edition, which is how I'm hoping to keep working on this. It adds edits with automatic backups and one-call undo, a PHP syntax check before saving, allow-listed plugin, theme and core updates, unlimited sites, a Docker HTTPS server and a full audit log. There's also a monthly plan with a nightly security check that alerts you to new admin accounts, PHP files in uploads and changed core files. Details: https://pressbridgesupport.github.io/pressbridge

One honest limit: file backups don't cover database changes such as plugin updates, so keep your normal database backups running.

Feedback welcome