Royal MCP – Secure AI Connector for Claude, ChatGPT & any LLM via MCP

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard created by Anthropic that lets AI assistants interact with external data sources. Without MCP, AI tools like Claude or ChatGPT can only work with content you copy and paste into them. With Royal MCP installed, these AI platforms can directly read your WordPress posts, create new content, manage your WooCommerce products, check your security status, and trigger backups — all through a structured, authenticated protocol.

Security. Most MCP plugins (and 41% of all public MCP servers) have no authentication at all. Royal MCP requires an API key for every session, rate-limits requests to prevent abuse, logs every interaction for audit purposes, and filters sensitive data (emails, PHP version, admin credentials) from responses. We built this plugin with the same security standards we apply to GuardPress, our WordPress security plugin used on thousands of sites.

No. WordPress 6.9 added the Abilities API (a primitive for registering AI-callable functions), and the wordpress/mcp-adapter package bridges abilities to the MCP protocol. Royal MCP is a full MCP server with the security layer, connector flows, and plugin integrations the bare primitive does not include: enforced API key auth, OAuth 2.0 for Claude Desktop, per-IP rate limiting, audit logging, sensitive-data redaction, 113 ready-to-use WordPress core tools, and 157 integration tools for WooCommerce, GuardPress, Royal AI Firewall, SiteVault, ForgeCache, Royal Ledger, Royal Links, Elementor, Divi, ACF, Yoast SEO, UpdraftPlus, WPForms, Redirection, Solid Security, Wordfence, Contact Form 7, MonsterInsights, W3 Total Cache, LiteSpeed Cache, Duplicator, BuddyPress, TablePress, Code Snippets, and WPCode.

Yes. When WooCommerce is active, Royal MCP automatically adds 29 MCP tools spanning product management (simple and variable, including variation CRUD and global attribute management), full coupon management (list/get/create/update/delete + bulk trash purge), order management (view, create, update, add notes, update status), customer data, and store statistics. No additional configuration is needed — the tools appear automatically in the MCP tools list.

Yes, with safety controls. Royal MCP exposes two tools for plugin configuration:

• wp_get_plugin_settings lets AI read any plugin’s stored settings by slug. Sensitive values (API keys, secrets, tokens, passwords, license keys, OAuth credentials) are automatically replaced with [REDACTED] before they leave your server, including values stored as JSON or encoded text, so AI assistants can understand a plugin’s configuration without ever seeing stored credentials.
• wp_update_option lets AI write to WordPress options, but only after passing three security gates: The site admin must enable the “Allow AI to write WordPress options” toggle on the Royal MCP settings page (off by default)
• The option name must be in a runtime allowlist. The default allowlist is intentionally tiny — blogname , blogdescription , posts_per_page , date_format , time_format , show_on_front , page_on_front . Plugin authors opt their own settings in via the royal_mcp_writable_options filter.
• A hard denylist permanently blocks writes to sensitive option names (siteurl, home, license keys, secrets, salts, etc.) regardless of the allowlist or the toggle.

Plugin authors can opt in their settings with one line: add_filter('royal_mcp_writable_options', fn($opts) => array_merge($opts, ['my_plugin_settings']));

Install Royal MCP, go to Royal MCP → Settings, and copy your API key and MCP server URL. In Claude Desktop, add a new MCP server configuration with the URL and send your API key as Authorization: Bearer <key> (the settings page shows the exact config). Full step-by-step guide at royalplugins.com/support/royal-mcp/ . If the connection fails, see the next FAQ.

About 90% of “can’t connect” / “OAuth failed” / “tools missing” issues resolve in a basic 4-step pass before any host-specific fix is needed. In order: (1) update Royal MCP to the latest version (every recent release fixes meaningful OAuth edge cases), (2) run a conflict test — deactivate all other plugins, switch to a default theme like Twenty Twenty-Five, and purge every cache layer (any cache plugin, your host’s server-level cache, Cloudflare/CDN, and browser cache), (3) wipe stale OAuth state — use the Reset OAuth State button in Royal MCP → Settings if you’re on 1.4.17 or newer, or run the four DELETE SQL queries documented in our support article, (4) check Royal MCP → Activity Logs for the most recent oauth: row, which records exactly which validation rule fired. Full walk-through with copy-pasteable commands at royalplugins.com/support/royal-mcp/troubleshooting-start-here.html . Only proceed to host-specific fixes (Cloudflare AI Bots toggle, SiteGround /.well-known/ static files, edge-cache exclusions) after the four basics are ruled out — most “advanced infrastructure” tickets we receive actually resolve in those four steps.

When you restore from backup, the OAuth client credentials Claude was holding no longer match anything on the WordPress side, so Claude’s connector ends up with a stale token that no Royal MCP installation will accept. The fix in Royal MCP 1.4.17+ is one click: go to Royal MCP → Settings and click the Reset OAuth State button. This wipes all stale OAuth clients, issued access/refresh tokens, and pending authorization codes. Then in Claude, delete the existing connector entirely, wait 30 seconds, and re-add it from scratch — the full OAuth flow runs fresh against the cleaned-up state and the connection works. On 1.4.16 or older the same effect can be achieved by running four DELETE SQL queries documented at royalplugins.com/support/royal-mcp/troubleshooting-start-here.html . The plugin’s settings, API key, and Activity Log are not affected by Reset OAuth State — only the OAuth handshake state.

Both messages (plus “no tools available” in Claude.ai after connecting) usually mean one of Royal MCP’s OAuth or sessions database tables is physically missing. The fix is to update Royal MCP to 1.4.29 or newer — the new runtime healer detects missing tables and recreates them automatically on the next pageload, with no deactivate/reactivate required. After updating, delete the existing Royal MCP connector in Claude, wait 30 seconds, then re-add it fresh. If you can’t update yet and need to recover immediately, the manual workaround is wp option delete royal_mcp_db_version followed by loading any wp-admin page. Full symptom diagnostic (phpMyAdmin / WP-CLI), the auto-heal explanation, and the manual recovery walkthrough are at royalplugins.com/support/royal-mcp/oauth-tables-missing.html .

By design, Royal MCP’s OAuth endpoints ( /register , /token , /authorize ) are registered as top-level WordPress rewrite rules at the site root , not as REST API routes under /wp-json/royal-mcp/v1/ . This is required by the OAuth 2.0 specification (RFC 6749) and the MCP discovery specs (RFC 8414 and RFC 9728), which mandate predictable site-root paths so OAuth-discovery-aware clients can find them without per-plugin configuration. If you’re auditing rewrite rules instead of REST routes, you can see ours via wp rewrite list | grep royal_mcp_oauth from WP-CLI. The /wp-json/royal-mcp/v1/ namespace contains the JSON-RPC tool endpoint at /mcp plus supporting REST routes ( /posts , /pages , /site , etc.) — but not the OAuth handshake endpoints themselves. Both routing layers are normal and both need to be reachable for the connector to work end-to-end.

Royal MCP is designed with defense in depth. API key authentication is required for all MCP sessions. Rate limiting prevents abuse (60 requests per minute per IP without credentials, 300 with; 300 per minute per user through the Abilities API and other MCP servers). Activity logging records every tool call. Sensitive data is filtered — user emails, usernames, admin email, PHP version, and credentials stored by any plugin (API keys, licence keys, tokens, passwords, webhook addresses) are hidden in every tool response, including values stored as JSON or encoded text. Comment creation respects your WordPress moderation settings. Post meta values are sanitized before storage. Option writes are disabled by default and gated by three independent checks (admin toggle, allowlist, hard denylist) when enabled. The plugin itself starts disabled by default — nothing is accessible until you explicitly enable it.

Yes. A local model can use Royal MCP through any client on your machine that speaks MCP, such as LM Studio, or an Ollama model running inside an MCP-capable app. The model runs on your own hardware and the client calls your site’s MCP Server URL, so nothing goes through a cloud AI provider.

Royal MCP performs a clean uninstall. All plugin options, database tables (activity logs), transients, and user meta are removed. No orphaned data is left behind.

Yes. Any MCP-compliant client can connect to Royal MCP. Configure your IDE or client with the MCP server URL ( https://yoursite.com/wp-json/royal-mcp/v1/mcp ) and the API key, sent as Authorization: Bearer <key> . Claude Desktop additionally supports the native “Add Connector” OAu