Most guides for connecting AI assistants to a self-hosted WordPress site via MCP suggest using Cloudflare Tunnel or ngrok to expose the site publicly. This works, but it also reintroduces infrastructure layers that can interfere with MCP: WAFs, bot-fight rules, page caches, and host-level rewrites that intercept REST API requests before WordPress ever handles them.
A cleaner alternative, if your machines are already on Tailscale: skip the public internet entirely.