We use AI every day. It helps us debug code, QA our work, and run research that would eat a whole afternoon if we did it by hand. At this point, that’s just how a modern agency operates.
That said, we’re still not telling clients to let AI build their business websites. That surprises people, especially now that vibe coding tools like Claude and Lovable make it look easy. So it’s worth walking through why.
A Fool With a Tool
We like an old line around here: a fool with a tool is still just a fool. AI is the newest proof of it. If you don’t know what a good website is supposed to do or how to properly review one, the tool doesn’t save you. It just helps you produce the wrong thing faster.
The bigger issue shows up in client conversations. We debug code with these tools every day, and some days a model invents a function that doesn’t exist and states it as fact. Clients see that same confidence and read it as proof that the output is good. AI is trained to tell you what you want to hear, and when you’re wrong, it agrees with you.
What We Found in the Backend
We’ve seen clients build WordPress sites entirely with AI. On the front end, they look “ok.” Decent layout, reasonable copy.
Then you open the backend, and everything is hard-coded. Nothing can be edited without touching code, which means every future change requires a developer. That defeats the entire point of WordPress. A CMS exists so a non-developer can update a headline, swap a photo, or add a page. An AI-built WordPress site you can’t edit isn’t really a WordPress site. It’s a hard-coded page that happens to live in WordPress.
We manage 700+ WordPress sites. Backends are basically our office, and what’s on the front end tells you almost nothing about what you’ll be living with after launch.
Vibe Coding Is a Different Bet
The industry now has a name for this: vibe coding. You describe what you want to an AI, prompt until it looks right, done. Legitimate way to work for the right project. What worries us is a business treating the vibe-coded site as the finished product rather than a prototype.
One distinction worth making, because the ads blur it. Some AI tools, like ZipWP and 10Web, generate real WordPress sites you can hand to any WordPress developer afterward. Others, like Lovable, generate and host everything on their own stack. The hard-coded backends we described above? It can happen with either. But the platform risk we’re about to get into only shows up with the second kind.
The pace of change here is faster than anything we’ve worked with. Tools launch, pivot, get acquired, shut down. Sometimes within the same year. Lovable works a certain way today and will work differently in six months. That’s a fine gamble for a weekend project. It’s a different conversation when the thing you’re building has to keep working long after the tool that built it has changed.
We’ve been through this part before, too. Every few years, something new is supposed to end the website business as we know it. Flash was going to make standard websites obsolete. DIY builders were going to make agencies unnecessary. Each one found a real lane, and websites kept getting built on the platforms that came before. We use the new tools daily. We just don’t have them handle everything for us.
The ownership part shows up in the smallest edits first. A headline change takes thirty seconds in the WordPress editor. The same change on a vibe-coded site means prompting, checking, and sometimes fixing what the AI broke on the way past. Want online booking added next year? The fix is more prompting (and hoping it works) or paying a developer to reverse-engineer code nobody planned out. Nobody writes documentation for that code, and there’s no community of people who know it.
What the WordPress Ecosystem Gives You
WordPress has its own numbers worth knowing. It still runs about four out of every ten websites on the internet, and the official plugin directory holds close to 60,000 free plugins. That number matters for a fairly boring reason: it’s why a WordPress site can grow with a business instead of getting rebuilt every time a need changes.
Need a form with conditional logic and payment fields? Gravity Forms has handled that for over a decade. Selling online? WooCommerce is the most widely used ecommerce platform in the world. Past that, the plugin directory covers backups, security, booking, multi-language, memberships, etc.
None of it locks you in, either. WordPress is open source, runs on thousands of hosts, and there are developers who know it inside and out in every metro in the country. If your agency relationship ever ends, your site moves with you, and any WordPress shop can pick it up. Handing off a vibe-coded site to a new shop isn’t a smooth process (if it’s possible at all).
What Google Actually Sees
Most vibe-coded sites are single-page applications. The browser builds the page with JavaScript after it loads, so what a visitor sees and what Google sees on first visit are two different things. Google can render JavaScript. It just happens in a second pass, and new pages sit in a rendering queue that can delay indexing by hours. Days, sometimes. A WordPress page is server-rendered HTML. The content is already there when the crawler shows up.
The small stuff gets skipped, too. Title tags, meta descriptions, schema: they only appear in the output if you explicitly prompt for them, and updating them page by page through conversation gets old by page three. Internal linking tends to be flat, which makes it harder for Google to understand the site. None of it shows up on launch day. You find out months later, when the site still looks fine and ranks for nothing.
The Risks You Can’t See
Nothing on the screen tells you a site is insecure. The failure that stops people: API keys for a payment processor hardcoded into client-side code, where anyone with browser developer tools can read them. Nobody prompts for input validation, so it never gets written, and the dependencies the AI pulls in come with no guarantee that anyone still maintains them.
The contact form is the quiet version of this: it accepts the entry, shows the visitor a confirmation screen, and never delivers the lead. Nobody at the business finds out until a customer calls to complain. It’s why our pre-launch QA includes submitting a real test entry to every form on the site. A business website has to actually work, and the only way to know is to test it like someone who’s paid to find what’s broken.
The Parts AI Shouldn’t Touch
Most business owners don’t think about privacy policies and cookie consent until it’s a problem. AI will happily generate a full privacy policy for you. It looks official. It also isn’t legal advice. AI isn’t an attorney and can’t see the big picture of your business, like what data you actually collect or which states your customers live in.
Even a roughly right policy on launch day doesn’t stay right. States keep updating privacy laws. A generated policy can be out of date before you know it, and nothing on the site will warn you. That’s AI in general: it hands you an answer, and nothing tells you when that answer stops being true.
Where AI Actually Earns Its Keep
AI sits in almost every part of our own process, just in the right seat. Debugging and ideating code goes faster with it, and it doubles as a second set of eyes during QA. It’s also how we generate content ideas and dig through research we’d never get to otherwise. A person still makes the final call, because we’re the ones accountable for what ships.
That’s the honest framing. If you know how to properly review and QA a build, AI is a genuine multiplier. If you don’t, it’s a shortcut to a site you can’t edit and shouldn’t fully trust.
When an AI Site Is Fine
An AI-built site isn’t always the wrong call. If you need a throwaway one-pager for a side project, an internal tool, or a fast test before committing a real budget, it can get you online for almost nothing. There’s a real subset of websites where that’s the smart play, and we’ll tell you when you’re in it.
Credit where it’s due, though. A lean AI-built site with no plugin stack can score beautifully on a speed test, and that matters. WordPress carries its own maintenance load: sites left unmaintained get hacked through outdated plugins, and a neglected WordPress site can get genuinely ugly within a couple of years. The difference is that WordPress’s failure modes are documented, and there’s a 20-year industry around fixing them. You accept the maintenance to get the flexibility, which is also why care plans exist.
For most business websites, that’s the trap. A business site has to rank in search, convert visitors, and stay editable for the next four to seven years, on a platform that will still exist in that form. No tool carries all that for you.
Questions We Get
Can AI build a good WordPress site?
It can build one that looks fine on the front end to the untrained eye. The problems live underneath, where everything from the content to the layout can be hard-coded and uneditable without a developer. Looking good at launch vs actually being good and easy to edit in-house are two different things.
Do you use AI in your own work?
Every day. We use it to debug and ideate code, help QA our work, generate content ideas, and speed up in-depth research. A person still makes the final call and owns the result.
Can I vibe code my business website using a tool like Claude or Lovable?
You can. It genuinely works for a prototype, an internal tool nobody outside your company sees, that kind of thing. Most businesses need more than that. They need a site that ranks, converts, stays editable for years, and sits on a platform with a 20-year ecosystem behind it. Vibe coding gets you a starting point, not the next four to seven years.
Are AI-built websites bad for SEO?
Google doesn’t penalize a site for being AI-built. It just has to be able to read it, and that’s where vibe-coded sites run into trouble. They get assembled in the browser with JavaScript, and Google processes that in a slower second pass, so indexing can lag. The details Google reads, like title tags and schema, only appear if you explicitly prompt for them. Launching fast doesn’t count for much if the site never gets found.
Can I start on an AI builder and switch to WordPress later?
You can, but don’t expect to carry anything with you. There’s no export button on most of these platforms. Your words can be copied over one page at a time, and the design and functionality get built again from scratch. Starting on WordPress takes longer up front and skips that do-over entirely.
Is WordPress still the right choice over an AI builder?
For a business website, yes. WordPress is a 20+ year-old platform with an established ecosystem of themes, plugins, and developers behind it, and it’s built so non-developers can manage their own content. AI builders are a newer technology with real strengths, but they don’t yet replace an established platform, a real build process, and a human who answers for the outcome.
We’ve been building websites since 2002. Long enough to know what still matters after launch. If you’re weighing an AI-built site against a real build, we’ll give you an honest read on your situation, including when the cheaper option is genuinely the right one.
Take a look at our WordPress web design services, or get in touch to schedule a 30-minute call with us, and we’ll talk through what makes the most sense for your situation.