WordPress Just Landed in Your Browser
WordPress just launched my.WordPress.net, a persistent, private workspace that runs entirely in your browser. No sign-up, no hosting, no domain. Here’s what it is, what it isn’t, and why it matters.
Not a Demo. Not a Sandbox. Something New.
If you’ve heard of WordPress Playground, the project that lets you spin up a temporary WordPress site in your browser, my.WordPress.net is built on that same technology, but it takes it somewhere different. Where Playground gives you a throwaway environment that disappears when you close the tab, my.WordPress.net is designed to stay. It’s permanent, it’s private, and it runs entirely inside your browser without ever touching a server.
Launched on March 11, 2026, this is WordPress’s most significant rethinking of the “getting started” experience since the famous five-minute install. There’s no sign-up form to fill out, no hosting plan to choose, no domain decision hanging over you. You open the URL, and you’re inside WordPress.
How It Actually Works
The engine underneath is WebAssembly (WASM). Thanks to advances in this browser standard, WordPress can now spin up a web server, a database (SQLite or MariaDB), and a full WordPress installation inside your browser in about 30 seconds. Matt Mullenweg first introduced the Playground concept at State of the Word back in 2022. my.WordPress.net is where that technology grows into something meant for daily use.
Your site’s data lives in your browser’s local storage. Nothing is uploaded to a server. That also means each device you use has its own separate installation, so you can’t log in from your phone and pick up where you left off on your laptop. It’s a trade-off worth understanding before you dive in.
The Playground containers are fully composable and atomic. You can track and roll back any change, essentially undo for everything, which makes this an unusually safe environment to experiment inside.
Private by Design, Not by Accident
Sites created on my.WordPress.net are private by default and not accessible from the public internet. The official announcement is direct about this: they aren’t optimized for traffic, discovery, or presentation, and they don’t need to be. The point isn’t to publish. It’s to have a space where ideas can exist before they’re ready to be shared, or where they may never be shared at all.
That framing is deliberate and worth sitting with. WordPress has always been about publishing. This is WordPress repositioned as a thinking tool: a place to draft, journal, research, collect notes, and build small personal utilities without any audience pressure. Contributor Alex Kirk described it well: this takes WordPress from democratizing publishing to democratizing digital sovereignty.
If you eventually want to take your site public, you can export it and move it to a dedicated WordPress host. The private workspace and the public web aren’t mutually exclusive. They’re just different stages.
The App Catalog: WordPress as a Personal Toolbox
To show what a private, persistent WordPress can actually become, my.WordPress.net ships with an App Catalog: a set of pre-configured experiences built with WordPress plugins that install with a single click. These aren’t third-party integrations. They’re built on WordPress itself, which is part of the point.
Personal CRM
A private relationship manager for staying in touch with people who matter to you. Contacts can be grouped, enriched with personal details, and paired with reminders to reconnect, all stored locally inside your WordPress, going nowhere.
Personal RSS Reader
Built using the Friends plugin, this turns your WordPress into a quiet, algorithm-free feed reader. Follow sites and creators inside your own private environment and read at your own pace, free from engagement metrics and external platform with its own agenda.
AI Workspace and Knowledge Base
Because my.WordPress.net runs on Playground, an AI assistant can safely modify it, tweaking existing plugins, building new ones, or working with data you’ve already stored inside WordPress. The assistant remembers what it touches, which means your WordPress can gradually become a personal knowledge base that the AI genuinely understands and works with over time.
What You Need to Know Before You Start
This is an early release, and the official announcement is upfront about the rough edges. A few things worth knowing before you build anything you care about inside it.
Good to know
All data stays in your browser and is never uploaded anywhere. You can reset the entire site with a single button click, or create separate temporary instances that clear themselves on refresh. You can also export and move your site to a real host whenever you’re ready to go public.
Keep in mind
Storage starts at roughly 100 MB, so this is better suited to personal apps and lighter use cases than large content-heavy sites. The first launch takes longer than usual while WordPress downloads and initializes. Each device runs its own separate installation. There’s no cross-device sync yet. Download backups regularly.
The Bigger Picture: From Millions to Billions
Matt Mullenweg was direct about the ambition here. In his own words, this shift in how WordPress is distributed, from something you install on a web host to something that runs as a self-contained unit anywhere, is what he believes will take WordPress from millions of installations to billions. Hosting isn’t going away; if anything, he expects demand for cloud syncing to grow sharply as the platform opens up.
What’s coming next is telling: peer-to-peer sync, version control integration, and cloud publishing so other people can actually access your Playground-based site. The private workspace is a starting point, not the destination. The infrastructure for a genuinely distributed, open, user-owned web is being laid out in plain sight, built on 23 years of backwards compatibility and a community that isn’t going anywhere.
Your WordPress. In Your Browser. Right Now.
No sign-up. No hosting. No decisions. Just open the link and start.