WordPress publishing software can now run entirely in your web browser, the organization behind open source publishing software was announced on Wednesday. Through a new service called my.WordPress.netWordPress software allows users to create a website and start 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 one big caveat to running WordPress this way: Sites set up on my.WordPress.net are private by default and not accessible from the public Internet.
“They’re not optimized for movement, discovery, or presentation, and they don’t need to be,” one blog post introducing the new service explains. “Instead, WordPress becomes a personal environment where ideas can exist before they’re ready to be shared, or where they may never be shared.”
Websites created through this service are connected to your browser, with their data stored in the browser’s storage. This means that you cannot access the website 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 such as private writing, journaling, editing, research and learning, or creating tools for personal use. For the latter, my.WordPress.net is equipped with an Application Catalog that offers 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 Playgroundthe open source project that allows you to install WordPress on any device with one click and that integrates with OpenAI and CLI applications to create new tools. As a result, you can use an AI helper to modify my.WordPress.net, to do things like modify a plugin or create 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 artificial intelligence.
The service will take longer to start the first time you use it, the post warns, and recommends regular backups. Its storage starts at around 100MB, which makes it best for smaller, personal apps and use cases.
If at any time you want to delete your current job, you can click a button to reset the site. Or you can set up new, temporary instances that are reset when the browser is refreshed.
The launch of the service follows the formation of a WordPress AI team last year, which focused on releasing new AI products for the developer community. Commercial hosting platform WordPress.com also released an AI website builder last year that lets you design a website using an AI chatbot-like interface.
