Every WordPress handoff ends the same way.
The site goes live. The client gets their login. You walk them through wp-admin on a Zoom call, share a screen recording, maybe write a little documentation. Two weeks later: "Hey, quick question, how do I add a new post again?"
The call isn't their fault. WordPress is not a simple piece of software, and a Zoom walkthrough is a terrible way to learn a new tool. You're watching someone else drive while trying to remember the route. The screen recording gets bookmarked and never watched again. The documentation gets ignored.
This happens on every project. It's not a client problem. It's a handoff problem.
What we tried first
We tried better documentation. Didn't help. The documentation lived somewhere else, and the client was already staring at wp-admin trying to do a thing. Context mismatch.
We tried shorter screen recordings, focused on one task at a time. Better, but clients still had to find the right video for the thing they were trying to do, and most didn't bother.
We tried annotating screenshots and building step-by-step guides in Notion. Those lasted until the first plugin update changed a menu location.
None of it solved the core problem: the guidance lived somewhere else, and the client needed it right here, on this screen, doing this thing, right now.
What we built
WP Client Tour is a WordPress plugin that delivers guided overlay tours inside wp-admin. It fires automatically on a client's first visit to a page, walks them through exactly what they need to know, and never shows again.
The tour lives in a JSON file. One file per workflow. You drop the file into the plugin's /tours/ directory, and it runs. No database imports, no plugin settings page to configure, no admin UI. The JSON specifies which pages the tour covers, which user roles see it, and what each step says. Steps can span multiple admin pages with automatic progression, so a tour can guide someone from "click Posts" to "here's the editor" to "here's where you publish" without stopping in the middle.
Clients also get a dashboard widget with a list of all available tours and completion checkmarks. If they want to replay a tour, they can. If they haven't run one yet, it shows as available.
The plugin is vanilla ES6, under 15 kB, zero external dependencies, no CDN calls. It's a small piece of software that does one thing.
The AI authoring part
The part that makes this practical is how the tours get written. Authoring tour JSON by hand, with CSS selectors for every button and panel, would take longer than the Zoom call it replaces.
Instead: describe the workflow to an AI assistant (we use Claude Code, but ChatGPT and Cursor both work). The assistant takes screenshots of the actual wp-admin interface, identifies the relevant UI elements, and generates the JSON with selectors and copy. The whole thing for a standard "how to add a blog post" tour takes about five minutes.
Each generated selector gets a confidence flag: high, medium, or low. Low-confidence selectors are the ones to spot-check. In practice, most come out high for standard WordPress UI elements.
When a plugin update changes something, you re-run the authoring flow and swap in a new JSON file. Git-committable, portable, version-controlled alongside the project.
Why it's open source
We build tools we use ourselves. WP Client Tour came out of a real handoff problem on a real project. Once it worked, publishing it made more sense than keeping it internal. If other developers have the same handoff problem, the tool is there.
There's also a selfish reason: open source tools get tested by people with different setups, different themes, different plugin combinations. Every edge case that surfaces improves the tool we use too.
The plugin is free, MIT-licensed, and lives at kingsbury-labs.github.io/wp-client-tour. No account required, no subscription, no vendor lock-in.
Who this is for
If you build WordPress sites for clients who are not developers, this is for you. The plugin is especially useful on sites with custom post types, multiple user roles, or any workflow that isn't immediately obvious from the default wp-admin interface.
It's also a good fit for agencies with a standard onboarding workflow: write the tours once, drop them into every project, and never repeat that post-launch Zoom call again.
If you're a Valley business that just launched a WordPress site with us, your admin already has tours built in. That's why you didn't get a screen recording.
Questions about the plugin or about how we handle client handoffs: get in touch.