AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT can now turn a description into a working web page in minutes. For getting an idea out of your head and onto a screen, they’re brilliant, and we use them ourselves.
The catch comes when that first version becomes your real business website. Some of the costs don’t show up until weeks or months later, when you need to change something, grow the site or hand it to someone else.
What building a website with AI usually means
You describe what you want, the AI writes the code, and you paste it into your website or publish it as it is. Some people call this vibe coding: building by describing the feel you want, rather than writing the code yourself. It’s a great way to start. It’s not always a great way to finish, and we’ve written before about where AI-built sites tend to fall over.
Pasted code brings its own baggage
A common shortcut is to take the code an AI tool produces and paste it into a page on an existing website. Each chunk usually arrives with its own styling and scripts, written for that one page rather than your whole site. Paste in a few and you end up with:
- A slower site, because every page loads extra code it doesn’t need.
- Styles that clash with your theme, so fonts, colours and buttons drift out of line.
- Pages nobody can edit without going back into the code, or back to the AI.
- Fixes that break other things, because nothing is shared or consistent.
None of this is obvious on day one. It shows up when you try to change a phone number and find it in six different places.
Going without WordPress altogether
Another route is to skip a content management system altogether and let AI write the whole site as code. It can work, but someone needs to be comfortable with tools like Claude Code, hosting, security updates and backups, because there’s no platform doing that for you. If that person is you and you enjoy it, great. If not, you’ve built something only one person, or one AI chat, can look after.
Why WordPress still makes sense
WordPress is open source, which means no company owns it and you own your website outright. It was built for exactly what a business website needs over time: adding pages, publishing news, handing updates to staff and growing without starting again.
According to W3Techs, WordPress runs about 40% of all websites (September 2026), more than any other platform. That share has dipped a little from around 43%, as AI opens up other ways to build. In our experience, plenty of businesses come back to WordPress once they need to update, grow and hand over their website.
Send it to us and we’ll tell you what it would take to build it properly, keeping the design you like.
Use AI for the idea, then build it properly
The best results we see use both. Use AI to explore ideas, sketch a layout or write a first draft of your content. Then build the real website on a foundation your team can edit, that loads quickly, can be found on Google and is kept secure. That’s what our AI concepts service is for: bring us what you’ve made, and we’ll turn it into a proper WordPress website that keeps the spark of your idea. Already running an AI-built site? We can move it to WordPress too.
The bottom line
AI tools are brilliant for getting started. The website your business relies on still needs to be fast, easy to edit, secure and yours. Use AI for the concept, then build it properly.
