WordPress has launched my.WordPress.net, a full WordPress installation that runs entirely in your browser, requires no sign-up, and doesn’t disappear when you close the tab.
Automattic-sponsored contributor Brandon Payton announced the personal workspace project on the WordPress.org News blog, framing it as an update to WordPress’s famous “five-minute install” philosophy for a browser-first era. “Your browser becomes your WordPress” is the announcement’s headline.
Built on WordPress Playground, the project is the work of Alex Kirk, who leads a team at Automattic working on WordPress Playground.
Sites created on my.WordPress.net are private by default — meaning they’re never publicly accessible — and come loaded with a small App Catalog of pre-configured tools: a personal CRM, an RSS reader, and an AI workspace, each installable with one click. Storage starts at around 100MB, data never leaves the browser, and each device keeps its own separate installation.
The pitch is WordPress as a personal workspace rather than a publishing platform. A place to think, draft, organize, and tinker without anything needing to be production-ready — or ever seen by anyone else.
A project that’s been in the works
The launch didn’t come out of nowhere. The Repository reported yesterday, in From Experimental Tool to AI Infrastructure: Adam Zieliński’s Vision for WordPress Playground in 2026, that Kirk’s persistent personal Playground was due “sometime in the coming months.” That sometime, it turns out, was now.
In our piece, Zieliński described the kind of software Kirk’s project makes possible in characteristically enthusiastic terms. He was particularly impressed by a Beeper integration that Kirk had built, allowing Playground to pull in his direct message history and surface patterns — like how often he was the one to initiate conversations with friends.
Zieliński called the personal Playground concept “home cooked software”: small, personal tools built for a handful of people, with no cloud hosting, no public launch, no directory listing. Just software made for the people you made it for.
The reception
Not everyone was convinced by the announcement itself.
On X, several people asked how my.WordPress.net differed from WordPress Playground, which already lets you spin up a temporary WordPress environment in a browser.
“How is this different from playground?” asked WPKitchen’s Abdul Rahman. Matt Medeiros from The WP Minute echoed the question: “is that not what playground already is?” Fellyph Cintra, Playground’s DevRel advocate, jumped in to clarify: “No, this version persists by default. You can create your apps and save on your personal playground.”
Medeiros remained unconvinced: “I read the post and the distinction wasn’t clear, imo. It feels like it’s a baby step to something else, but I would have launched it with that something else.”
Designer Rafal Tomal shared his blunt assessment of the project’s landing page: “This is why other platforms make fun of WordPress…” Automattic Product Manager Rich Tabor didn’t argue: “the bar has to be higher.”
What it’s trying to be
The announcement quotes Kirk describing the project as “democratizing digital sovereignty” rather than democratizing publishing, which is WordPress’ tagline. It’s a framing that positions my.WordPress.net not as a website builder, but as something closer to owning your own private corner of the internet.
The landing page also hints at an off-ramp to traditional hosting. “Ready to go bigger?” it reads. “Move your Playground to dedicated WordPress hosting to access it from any device, share it publicly, or invite specific people to collaborate.” That framing positions my.WordPress.net as a starting point for building something bigger — which might be exactly what Medeiros had in mind when he said he’d have launched the project with “that something else.”
Whether that framing resonates beyond the WordPress community may depend on how clearly the project can communicate what it actually is — a question its launch week has already raised.
After publication: The bigger picture
Shortly after this story published, WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg weighed in on his personal blog and made clear that my.WordPress.net is just the opening move in a much larger play.
Mullenweg framed Playground-powered WordPress as a fundamentally new kind of software: fully composable, atomic, and version-controllable.
“Stop thinking of WordPress as just on a web host and worrying about maintenance and management,” he wrote, “and more as a self-contained unit of open source goodness, a fun little package where you own and control the code and data and can run it however you like.”
He outlined a roadmap that goes well beyond what launched today: peer-to-peer sync, version control integration, and cloud publishing are all coming, the last of which would let other people access your Playground-based site. That’s the “something else” Medeiros said was missing, and Automattic is apparently already building it.
Mullenweg said he believed my.wordpress.net would “take us from millions of WordPresses in the world to billions.”
“Today, everyone gets a phone number and email when they grow up. That will expand in the future — everyone will have a domain and a WordPress,” he said.
The launch also got mainstream tech press pickup, with TechCrunch among those covering the announcement.
Updated March 12, 2026: This story has been updated to include comments published by Matt Mullenweg on his blog following the original publication of this article.
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