I’m a web designer, so you might expect me to say no, but I won’t. I’ve been designing websites for about 25 years, and these days I use AI tools every single day. Some businesses can build their website with AI and be perfectly happy with it. For others it’s a false economy that costs them far more than it saves.
The honest answer depends on what your website needs to do, and on understanding what AI is good at. That second part is where most of the advice out there falls down, because it’s written either by people selling AI builders or by designers who feel threatened by them. I’m neither.
I’ve heard “anyone can build a website” before
When I started out, the promise was templates. Then it was website builders. I clearly remember a stretch where it felt like every second YouTube video opened with an ad telling you anybody could build a professional website in minutes. Hosting companies started throwing in free site builders, and every few years someone announced that web designers were finished.
In fact, the web design industry kept growing. Each new tool made it easier to start a website, but none of them made finishing one any easier, because that part depends on understanding the business and its customers.
I’ve also had plenty of clients over the years who designed their own website in Photoshop or Canva. Some of those designs were genuinely good. But they’d get to the end of it and hit the same wall: now how do I make this an actual website people can visit? One where customers can buy things, sign up to a newsletter, become members, join a course or make a booking? That part was always my job, and it still is.
AI is the biggest of these waves so far, and it’s far more capable than anything before it, but the pattern hasn’t changed. Anyone can spin up a website now. Making it a good one still takes design and web experience.
What AI gives you: a very good first draft
You can describe your business to a tool like Claude, ChatGPT, Lovable or the WordPress.com AI builder, and within minutes you’ll have something that looks finished, with colours, fonts, layout, photos and even some copy. A few years ago, that would have taken a designer days or weeks to mock up. It’s impressive, and for a lot of people it’s a perfectly usable starting point.
It helps to understand what you’re looking at, though. Some designers call this the slop stage, which sounds harsh, but they mean average rather than bad. AI builds a website by drawing on everything it has seen and giving you the most likely version of what you asked for. That’s why so many AI websites share the same tells once you know to look for them: a soft gradient glow in the background, a centred headline over two buttons, a perfectly symmetrical grid of three icons, text that’s a touch too small, and copy about “elevating your experience”. Everything is technically in the right place, yet nothing feels like anyone made a decision. One designer described it as designed but not thought through, and I think that nails it.
In that sense, an AI website isn’t much different from a good template. It’s a clean, generic start, and just like a template, the real work begins once you’ve got it.
Where it starts to fall apart: making changes
The first version is the easy part. The trouble starts when you want to change something.
Look closely at most AI-generated pages and you’ll start to notice uneven spacing between sections, elements that look like buttons or tabs but don’t do anything, and text that overlaps an image at certain screen sizes. Often the layout looks great on a laptop and falls to pieces on a phone. These things jump out at me instantly, but that comes from years of looking at websites. Designers call it a design eye, and you can’t download one.
Even when you can tell something is off, you then have to explain it to the AI. Most people end up typing something like “this looks a bit weird, can you fix it?” and hoping for the best. A designer can say exactly what’s wrong: reduce the padding below this section to match the grid spacing, stack the image above the text on mobile, make these filters clickable or remove them. Vague instructions leave the AI guessing, and every guess can break something that was working.
The “build your website in five minutes” ads never mention this. You can edit an AI website, but you don’t know what you don’t know. You can’t ask for a design decision you’ve never heard of, and you can’t fix a problem you can’t see.
Then there’s the question of how the site is built underneath. A lot of AI tools produce a website made of code. It can look fantastic, but every future change means more prompting or editing code, and coded sites aren’t easy to drag and drop your way out of. There’s a reason most small business websites moved to systems like WordPress years ago. People wanted to update their own opening hours without calling a developer, and they still do.
Five things AI can’t do for you
When I think about what separates a website that works from one that just looks fine, it comes down to five things. AI can help with all of them, but it can’t do any of them on its own.
1. The feel
People decide how they feel about a website in about half a second, well before they read anything. They sense straight away whether it seems trustworthy or cheap, warm or cold. That reaction comes from colour, spacing, photography, fonts and tone all working together.
AI knows the textbook version of this. It can tell you blue suggests trust and green suggests growth, but it has never felt anything looking at a page. It has only read descriptions of how designs make people feel. So it can echo a mood that already exists, but it struggles to create the right one for you.
A lot of good design comes down to taking things away, like removing a distracting background or swapping a font that feels slightly wrong for your audience. Often you sense that something is off before you can explain why, and you work backwards from there. Knowing what to remove is a judgement call, and AI tends to add rather than subtract.
2. The craft
Craft is the hundred small decisions a good designer makes that you would never think to ask for: how to break up a long page so people can scan it, which details belong up front and which can be tucked away for the people who want them, where the eye should land first, and how a form should behave when someone makes a mistake.
Each of these decisions is small, but together they decide whether people read a page or leave it. AI tends to skip this layer because it defaults to the standard layout, and you can’t tell it to sweat the details you don’t know exist.
3. Your point of view
AI averages things out, while what makes people choose one small business over another is usually the opposite of average: your opinions, your story, the way you do things, and the slightly unusual details that make you a real person.
Feed your bio into an AI tool and those details are often the first things it trims, because they don’t look “professional”. Yet they’re what customers remember and relate to. People are getting very good at sensing when something feels mass-produced, and younger customers in particular are quick to pick it.
4. The structure
By structure I mean the order in which a page tells its story, so a visitor moves from “I’m not sure I need this” to “I need this” by the time they reach the bottom.
AI arranges information neatly, but persuasion is a separate skill. A page that converts usually opens with the problem your customer has, shows them you understand it, explains how you fix it, then backs that up with proof. That order changes depending on whether your visitors already know what they’re looking for or have never heard of a service like yours. AI plays it safe and gives you a tidy information page, which rarely moves anyone to act.
5. The words
This is the one everyone assumes AI has already won. It hasn’t, at least not without a lot of help.
AI was never in the room with your customers. It hasn’t heard how they describe their problem in their own slightly awkward words, so it gives you the average of every website it has read, which is exactly the generic sound you’re trying to avoid.
The best website copy uses your customers’ language, not yours and definitely not an AI’s. A plain line like “avoid getting ripped off by your builder” will do more work than any polished tagline, because it shows you understand what keeps your customers up at night. AI does help here, though. Give it your notes from enquiries, emails and conversations, and ask it to pull out the phrases people use and the patterns it spots. It’s brilliant at that. You gather the real material and AI helps organise and analyse it, but a human makes the final call on what goes on the page.
If AI built it in five minutes, so can your competitor
If your website came from a prompt, your competitor can get something very similar from a prompt too. Anything on your site that AI invented, AI can invent again for someone else.
Ask yourself whether your customers would recognise your website as yours if a competitor copied it tomorrow. If they wouldn’t, your website isn’t doing much to represent your business. The five things above are what make a website unmistakably yours, and they’re the parts AI can’t supply.
The getting-it-live gap
Even a great-looking AI website still has to become a real one. That means a domain registered in your name, hosting you control, email on your domain, forms that arrive in your inbox, a privacy policy, search engine and AI search setup, analytics and backups. If you’re selling online or taking bookings, add payments, shipping, stock and booking rules. AI tools will happily generate the pages, but most of the rest is still left to you.
Watch out for lock-in too. Plenty of people found out the hard way with earlier website builders that their site lived inside someone else’s platform. Moving it, adding the features they needed or getting away from rising monthly fees turned out to be much harder than starting. Some AI builders work the same way.
When AI on its own is fine
There are plenty of situations where an AI-built website is all you need:
- A hobby or personal website
- Testing a business idea before you invest in it
- A one-off event, launch or landing page with a short life
- A simple page your customers will rarely see
- A business that just needs to exist online, where nobody is choosing you based on your website
In these cases speed matters more than polish, and the stakes are low. I’d also expect AI to take over most of the cheap, quick website market, like one-page brochure sites, link-in-bio pages and templates with the logo swapped. If a web designer’s whole business is changing the colours on a template, they should be worried, because AI already does that well. That’s not the kind of work I do, and the real value has never been there.
When it costs more than it saves
It’s different when your website is how customers find you, judge you and get in touch. If you rely on enquiries, bookings or online sales, your website is doing a sales job every day. Small things matter: whether people trust it, whether they can find what they need, whether it works on their phone, and whether Google and AI search tools can find it at all.
It’s worth counting the costs that don’t show up on an invoice:
- Your time. Building, rewriting, troubleshooting, and learning about hosting, domains and email setup adds up quickly, often to days or weeks.
- The rebuild trap. I’ve seen people spend two weeks wrestling an AI site into shape, only to find that adding the features they need means starting again.
- Missed enquiries. A website that doesn’t build trust, or isn’t being found, costs you work without you noticing. You never see the customers who left.
- Platform fees. Builder subscriptions and paid add-ons can cost more over a few years than people expect.
A professionally built website costs more up front. Whether it’s worth it depends on how much your business relies on its website. For most businesses that win work online, a site that does its job pays for itself.
How I use AI
I’m not anti-AI. It has changed how I work more than anything else in my career, and it’s replaced hours of searching forums for answers. I use it to research, to analyse a client’s goals and spot angles I might have missed, to check pages for accessibility and consistency issues, to compare plugins without wading through biased “top 10” lists, and to write code snippets that would once have taken me an afternoon.
I also override it constantly. It overcomplicates things, makes confident mistakes, and sometimes heads off in completely the wrong direction. I’d say about half the time I’m pulling it back and telling it exactly how I want something done, which is how the tool should be used. AI is a brilliant assistant and a poor decision maker, and the person using it needs to know enough to tell the difference.
That’s also why experienced designers are in a strong position right now. The people who know what good looks like, and can describe it precisely, get the most out of these tools.
The middle path: AI and a designer together
This is the part I find exciting. You don’t have to choose between doing everything with AI and handing a blank page to a designer.
Use AI to explore. Ask it to mock up a few home page ideas, play with colours and layouts, and draft some text about your business. Gather the words your customers use, and work out what you like and what you don’t. Then bring all of that to a designer.
You’ll save time and money at the briefing stage, because you can show rather than describe, and your AI work becomes the brief. The designer can then focus on the parts AI can’t do well: the feel, the craft, the structure, the words, the technical setup, and building it so you can manage it yourself. This is exactly how our AI to Reality service works.
What this looks like in practice
We’ve had a couple of clients come to us recently with websites they’d built using AI. They had a good-looking draft but didn’t know what to do next. They weren’t sure how to edit it, how to get it found, or whether it was even finished.
In both cases we used their AI version as the starting point and rebuilt it in WordPress and Elementor so they could edit it themselves. Then we filled in the gaps: proper copy, working forms, search setup and hosting they control. We also connected an AI assistant to their websites, so they can keep making changes in plain English if they’d rather not learn Elementor. They kept what they liked about their AI design and ended up with a website that works for their business.
Where this is heading
AI website tools are improving fast, And in a year or two you may well be able to describe a website and get everything completed in one prompt… domain name, hosting, ad campaigns, then customer knocking at your door.
The hard part though, might always be knowing what to ask for: who the site is for, how it needs to make them feel, what order the story should go in, and which of a hundred small decisions matter for your business. Better tools make that knowledge more valuable. Designers who think deeply about their clients’ businesses will be using AI to do better work, faster. Designers who only ever swapped logos on templates will struggle, and honestly, that was always going to happen.
So, should you build your business website with AI?
If your website is a side project, an experiment or something that simply needs to exist, go for it. AI will get you there quickly, and you’ll learn a lot along the way. If you’ve already started and you’re not sure what comes next, my guide on what to do after you’ve made a website with AI is a good place to start. My post on the 90% of website design AI doesn’t see also has a quick self-check you can run on any draft.
If your website is how customers find and judge your business, use AI for ideas, drafts, research and speed, and get someone experienced to handle the rest. If that sounds like you, I’m always happy to have a look at what you’ve made.
