WordPress’s publishing software can now run entirely in the web browser, the organization behind the open source publishing software announced on Wednesday. Through a new service called my.WordPress.net, the WordPress software lets users set up a site and begin publishing without signing up, setting up a hosting plan, or registering a domain. Instead, the new solution leverages the same technology that powers WordPress demos and makes it available as a permanent, personal publishing platform.
There is a big caveat to running WordPress this way: the sites set up on my.WordPress.net are private by default and not accessible from the public internet.
“They aren’t optimized for traffic, discovery, or presentation, and they don’t need to be,” a blog post introducing the new service explains. “Instead, WordPress becomes a personal environment where ideas can exist before they are ready to be shared, or where they may never be shared at all.”
The sites created through this service are bound to your web browser, with their data saved in the browser’s storage. That means you can’t access the site from another device. But you can move your site to a dedicated WordPress host if you ever want to make it public.
This positions WordPress as a personal workspace for activities like private writing, journaling, drafting, research, and learning, or building tools for personal use. For the latter, my.WordPress.net comes equipped with an App Catalog offering a variety of tools built with WordPress plugins, including a Personal CRM, Personal RSS Reader, a bookmarking tool, an AI Workspace, and more.
The post notes that my.WordPress.net is powered by WordPress Playground, the open source project that lets you install WordPress on any device with one click, and which also integrates with OpenAI and CLI apps to create new tools. As a result, you can use an AI assistant to modify my.WordPress.net, to do things like tweak a plugin or build a new one.
You can also ask the assistant about data stored in WordPress, which it remembers, allowing WordPress to become a personal knowledge base accessed by AI.
The service will take longer to launch the first time you use it, the post cautions, and recommends that backups should be saved regularly. Its storage starts at roughly 100 MB, which makes it better for smaller, personal apps and use cases.
If, at any time, you want to delete your current work, you can click a button to reset the site. Or you can set up new, temporary instances that reset themselves when the browser is refreshed.
The launch of the service follows the formation of a WordPress AI team last year, focused on launching new AI products for the developer community. The commercial hosting platform WordPress.com also launched an AI website builder last year that lets you design a site using an AI chatbot-style interface.