How to Connect Claude AI to a Custom PHP Website (Step by Step)

If your website isn’t WordPress, most of the “use AI on your website” advice out there skips right past you.

We run a small web agency, and a lot of the sites we look after are plain PHP: a handful of templates, a config.php, a MySQL database, all sitting on shared hosting. For a long time, getting Claude to help on those sites meant copying a file into the chat, copying the answer back, uploading it again and hoping nothing else needed to change.

That’s fine for one file. It falls apart when the thing you want to change lives in eleven.

So this is the setup we use now. Claude is connected straight to the site, so it can look around, make the edit and save it. It takes about five minutes, and you don’t need to write any code.

What “connecting Claude” actually means

Claude can use outside tools through something called MCP, short for Model Context Protocol. The easiest way to think about it: you hand Claude a menu. “You’re allowed to list files, read a file, edit a file, run a SELECT query.” When Claude decides it needs one of those, it picks it from the menu.

In the Claude app, one of these menus is called a custom connector. For a PHP site, the thing that serves the menu can be a single PHP file in your public_html folder. Claude asks, your server does the work, and the result comes back. Your files never leave your hosting.

What you need before you start

You probably have most of this already:

• Hosting that runs PHP 7.4 or newer, with HTTPS (Hostinger, any cPanel host and most shared hosting qualify)
• Access to your hosting’s File Manager or FTP
• A Claude plan that lets you add custom connectors
• Optional: a config.php that creates a $pdo database connection, if you want Claude to work with your data too

No database? That’s fine. The file tools work on their own.

Step 1: Generate the connector file

You can write an MCP server yourself if you’re comfortable with PHP. The protocol part is honestly the easy bit. The work is in the safety checks: keeping it inside your site folder, never deleting anything for good, and making sure nobody else can use it. That’s the part we packaged up as Claude Bridge.

Open the Custom PHP generator, enter your license key, your website name and your URL, and click generate. You’ll get a ZIP with one PHP file in it.

The file has a long, random-looking name. Leave it exactly as it is. That name works like a password: only someone who knows the full URL can reach the connector.

Step 2: Upload it

1. Log in to your hosting panel and open File Manager (or connect with FTP).
2. Open public_html, the folder your website lives in.
3. Upload the PHP file from the ZIP. Don’t rename it.
4. Open the file’s full URL in your browser.

If you see a short line of JSON, you’re good. If you get a 404, the file is in the wrong folder or the name changed on the way.

Step 3: Add it to Claude

1. In Claude, open Settings, then Connectors.
2. Click Add custom connector.
3. Give it your website’s name and paste the full connector URL.
4. Save.

One thing that trips people up: don’t add ?key= or anything else to the end of the URL. Connectors don’t pass it through, and the long file name already does that job.

Step 4: Start with something small

Don’t open with “redesign my homepage”. Start with something you can check in ten seconds, like:

“List the files on my website and tell me which pages link to something that doesn’t exist.”

You’ll see Claude call tools like list_files, read_file and search_files while it works. When you ask for a real change, it reads the file first, edits only the lines involved, and drops a copy of the old version into a _trash folder. That last part is worth knowing about before you ever need it.

What it can and can’t touch

Once it’s connected, Claude can read and edit files inside public_html, search your whole site for a bit of text, check whether a page returns a 200 or a 404, and read the end of your PHP error log when something breaks. With a database connected, it can list your tables and run read-only queries.

What it can’t do is wander outside your website folder, and it won’t run a database write unless the request is explicitly confirmed. Reads are free; changes need a yes.

If something goes wrong

• Claude says it can’t connect: open the connector URL in your browser first. Nine times out of ten it’s the folder or the file name.
• Database tools fail: check that config.php sits in the same folder and actually creates $pdo.
• Changes don’t show up: clear your site cache or your host’s CDN cache.
• License message: each key works on one domain. If you moved your site, get in touch and we’ll move it.

If your site is on shared hosting, our notes on using Claude AI on Hostinger or cPanel cover the host-specific bits.

Running WordPress instead? Our free WordPress MCP plugin connects Claude to your site with scoped keys, change previews and recovery snapshots.

Want to try it on your own site?

Claude Bridge is $19 per website per year, and there’s a free 7-day trial if you’d rather test it first. If you get stuck anywhere, email softpulsehub@gmail.com and a person, not a bot, will get back to you.