Connect WordPress to Spectersync — edit your posts in the browser

This is the first thing you do in Spectersync and the only setup that touches WordPress itself. Once it’s done, your posts and pages open as clean, editable content in your browser — title, slug, status, categories, tags, excerpt, and feature image all there, the body as plain prose. You run AI recipes across the whole archive, review every change as a diff, and publish back, and you don’t think about the connection again unless something changes on the WordPress side. Subscribe now and your workspace opens with 500 free credits. Browsing and reviewing are free; only AI runs spend credits.

What you need before you start

Three things:

Your site URL. The exact URL you’d type in a browser to load your homepage — https://example.com. If your site lives at a subdirectory (https://example.com/blog), use that full URL. Trailing slash optional, Specter normalizes it.
A WordPress username. The login name of the account whose posts and pages you want to sync. Specter will only see what that user can see, so if you want full-site access, use an Administrator or Editor.
An Application Password for that user. Not your regular login password. WordPress has had Application Passwords baked in since version 5.6 — they’re per-app credentials you can name, scope, and revoke without changing your main password. The full step-by-step is in generate a WordPress Application Password; generate one called “Spectersync” and copy it before you close the screen, because WordPress won’t show it to you again.

That’s it. No plugin to install, no theme changes, nothing to paste into wp-config.php, and nothing to download — the connection happens in your browser.

Self-hosted vs WordPress.com

Spectersync talks to your site over the WordPress REST API. Anywhere that API is on and reachable, Spectersync works.

Self-hosted WordPress (WordPress installed on your own host — Kinsta, WP Engine, SiteGround, Hostinger, a DigitalOcean droplet, your own server): works out of the box. The REST API is on by default. You’re the one who decides what plugins and security rules are in front of it, so if something is blocking it, you can fix it.
WordPress.com: works only on the Business plan or higher (Business, Commerce, or Enterprise). The Personal and Premium plans don’t expose the REST API to outside applications, and there’s nothing Spectersync can do about that — it’s a platform restriction. If you’re on a lower plan and want this workflow, you’ll either need to upgrade or migrate to self-hosted.

(Note: Spectersync connects via Application Passwords over the REST API — there’s no WordPress.com OAuth or Jetpack flow.)

If you’re not sure which one you have: log in and look at the admin URL. If it’s wordpress.com/..., you’re on WordPress.com. If it’s yoursite.com/wp-admin, you’re self-hosted.

The connection itself

In the Spectersync webapp, choose WordPress as your site type and paste in the three things above: URL, username, Application Password. There’s nothing to install — the workspace runs in your browser.

Hit connect. Spectersync makes a single authenticated request to your site’s REST API, confirms the credentials work, and then pulls your content in. The first sync is the longest — a few hundred posts takes a minute or two. After that, syncs are incremental.

When it finishes, your archive opens in the workspace. Every post and page is clean, editable content with its title, slug, status, date, categories, tags, excerpt, featured-image URL, and your Yoast or Rank Math SEO fields all preserved; the body is plain prose. From here you can edit a post by hand or run an AI recipe across the whole archive, and Spectersync handles pushing the changes back — see bulk edit WordPress for SEO for the kind of work that’s now in reach.

When the REST API is the problem

If the connection fails, it’s almost always one of these:

A security plugin is blocking REST API requests from outside the dashboard. Wordfence, iThemes Security, and a few others have a setting that locks the REST API down to logged-in admin sessions. You’ll need to allowlist Application Password requests for Spectersync to get through.
A WAF or host-level firewall is rate-limiting or blocking authenticated API traffic. Cloudflare, Sucuri, and managed hosts sometimes have rules that look at the Authorization header. Allowlisting the request usually fixes it.
The Application Password got pasted with extra spaces. WordPress shows it with spaces every four characters for readability — Spectersync handles that, but a stray newline at the end will break it. Re-copy and try again.
A 2FA plugin is intercepting Application Password auth. Some 2FA plugins force every login through their flow, including app passwords. The fix is in the Application Password guide — most of these plugins have a checkbox to exempt app passwords.

Once you’re connected

You don’t have to revisit any of this unless your URL changes, the user gets deleted, or you revoke the Application Password. The workspace is now the surface you work against — edit one post by hand, or sweep the whole archive with an AI recipe. When you’re ready to publish, Spectersync shows a dry-run diff first and asks before anything touches your live site. If a post changed on both sides since the last sync, it pauses and asks rather than overwriting; every publish keeps a snapshot behind it so reverting is a decision, not a recovery project.

That’s the whole point of the connection: set it up once, then forget about it and work in the browser.

Prefer the desktop edition?

Some writers want their archive as plain .md files on their own machine — in an Obsidian vault, a git repo, wherever — with the engine running locally and nothing routed through our servers. That’s the desktop and open-source edition: the same two-way sync, dry-run preview, and conflict handling, running entirely on your Mac. The hosted webapp is the fastest way in. Subscribe now →