You inherit a WordPress site. A client hands one over, a friend asks you to look at theirs, or you open a project you set up two years ago and no longer remember. The first thing you want is not to change anything. It is to know what you are dealing with. What is this site, and what is running on it. Agent Abilities for MCP gives an agent exactly that much, and pointedly no more.
Two abilities, both reads
There are two abilities in play here, and neither one writes.
The first is get-site-info. It reads the basics: the site name, the tagline, the site URL, and the language it is set to. Nothing dramatic, but it is the orientation you want before anything else, especially on a site you did not build.
The second is list-plugins. It reads the installed-plugins list and reports each plugin’s name, its version, and whether it is active or sitting there inactive. That is the picture that usually tells you the most on an unfamiliar site, the dormant plugin nobody removed, the one three versions behind, the pile of things that were switched on once and never off.
Ask an agent that holds these two, and you get a one-screen brief: here is the site, here is everything installed on it, here is what is actually running. For taking stock of a site you have just been handed, that is often the whole job.
Listing is not the same as touching
Here is the part worth making the center of the whole thing, because it is easy to assume otherwise. Listing your plugins is strictly a read. The list-plugins ability can tell you what is installed and what is active. It cannot activate a plugin. It cannot deactivate one. It cannot install, update, delete, or reconfigure anything. There is no write hiding inside it, no clever second step where reporting turns into changing. It reads, and it reports, and that is the end of what it can do.
That boundary is not a promise you have to take on faith. It is baked into the ability. And there is a second gate on top of it: to even read the plugin list, the connected account has to hold the activate_plugins capability, the same capability WordPress requires to reach the Plugins screen in wp-admin. So the ability that is only ever a read still asks the account to be one that would, in principle, be trusted around plugins. If the account cannot get to the Plugins screen normally, it cannot list plugins through the agent either.
The effect is that you can safely point an agent at a site for this, even a site you care about, without the usual worry that “let it look around” quietly means “let it change things.” Looking around is all it can do.
What it does not tell you
Being honest about the edges is part of the point, so here is where this stops.
This is not the full WordPress Site Health screen. The agent reads the installed-plugins list and the basic site info, and that is the scope. It does not pull the Site Health diagnostics WordPress generates, the server and database details, the loopback and REST checks, the recommended-improvements panel. If you want that depth you are still going to open Site Health yourself.
It also does not tell you which plugins have updates waiting. It reports the version each plugin is currently on, which is genuinely useful for spotting something that looks ancient, but it does not compare that against what is available in the directory or flag “update available.” Knowing a plugin is on 1.2.0 is a starting point; knowing 1.2.0 is four versions stale is a separate lookup this ability does not do for you.
Neither of those is a gap you have to work around so much as a line worth knowing, so you ask the agent for what it can actually give and go elsewhere for the rest.
Try it
The matching recipe, Take stock of your site and plugins, read only, has the exact prompt and the two abilities it needs, both of them reads. It is a good first thing to run on any connected site, precisely because it cannot go wrong. Nothing it does can be undone, because nothing it does changes anything.
If the read-only guarantee is what makes this comfortable to run, that is the whole design showing through. The security overview lays out why a read stays a read here, and why the account still has to earn even that. Start with the inventory, see the shape of the site, then decide, deliberately, whether anything more than reading is worth switching on.