Everywhere you look, there seems to be another post saying the same thing:
“I built a website with AI in 10 minutes.”
And technically… that can be true.
Today, you can describe your business in a few sentences and watch something that looks remarkably like a website appear in front of you. Some AI tools can take it even further and help you publish that website, connect a domain or even build more complex functionality.
It’s pretty amazing.
But there’s an important difference between generating a website quickly and building a website that actually works for your business.
So, can you really build your small business website with AI?
That’s what I want to explore in this post.
Building a website was already confusing before AI
Before AI, small business owners already had a lot of choices: Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, WordPress, Webflow, Weebly, a custom-coded website, or hiring a designer or developer.
The first difficult question to answer was already:
Which one should I use?
There was never one universally “best” website platform. The right choice depended on what you were building, your technical knowledge, your budget, how much control you wanted, and how much of the technical side you wanted to handle yourself.
And AI hasn’t made that decision disappear either.
If anything, it has given us even more options to choose from, and made the decision even harder.
Alongside traditional website builders, we now have AI website builders, AI coding tools, AI app builders, general AI assistants, and traditional platforms adding AI features of their own. ChatGPT, Claude, Lovable, Replit, Wix AI, Squarespace AI. And those are only a few of the names you might come across.
You can spend hours researching platforms, watching comparison videos and reading Reddit threads trying to figure out which tool is the best.
But the perfect tool probably doesn’t exist.
For a small business owner, choosing a tool that fits your needs and actually getting started is often a much better use of your time than endlessly searching for the theoretically best option.
So… can AI actually build you a website?
AI website building has come a long way since it first hit the mainstream.
You can use AI in many different ways when building a website now. For example, you can ask AI to write parts of the code for you, vibe code an entire website through a conversation, or use an existing, well-known website builder like Squarespace or Wix to help you with layout ideas.
Any of the above solutions can help speed up your work if you use them the right way. But no matter which one you use, there is one thing AI still needs from you, and that is direction.
And this is where the promise of building a website with just a few prompts becomes a little more complicated.
One of the reasons AI website builders are so appealing is the shortcut they seem to offer.
You don’t want to spend weeks learning how websites work. You want to tell AI what your business does, let it work its magic and have your website ready.
But imagine your entire prompt is this:
“Build a website for my therapy practice.”
There are a lot of unanswered questions hiding inside that one sentence.
- Who exactly is the website for?
- What should it feel like?
- What should your visitors see first?
- Which services should be most prominent?
- What pages do you need at all?
- What makes your practice different?
AI can fill in those blanks for you. In fact, that’s part of what makes it feel so ✨magical✨.
But those blanks are often where the most important decisions lie. And they should be answered by the person who knows your business best: you.
If you don’t give AI enough information to work from, it will come up with its “own” ideas. And the result will reflect that.
No input → crap
Good amount of input → much better output
AI can make building a website much faster. But you still need to know what you want that website to do for you.
A website is much more than what you see on the screen
Let’s dive into the more technical side of it for a bit. When you open a newly generated website, you see the visual layer: the images, colours, fonts, in other words, the overall layout.
But that’s only one part of a website.
The Strategy
Before you even get to the design, there is the strategy: your target audience, your website goals, and the user journey, which basically means the way you guide someone from arriving on the site to contacting you or buying from you.
The Front-End
Then comes the most visual part, which is the front-end. This includes the colour palette, typography, image layout, calls to action, responsive behaviour, and much more.
The Back-End
Behind the visual layer, there is the underlying infrastructure that makes your website interactive: the back-end. This includes all the more technical parts, such as the overall logic, databases, and integrations with third-party tools.
And lastly, let’s not forget about security and maintenance. If you use AI to build your website, you need to understand, or at the very least take into consideration, security vulnerabilities, updates, and backups. And this isn’t a one-time task, it’s something you need to keep in mind regularly.
AI doesn’t automatically give you expertise, you should treat it as a tool
AI can get you very far, really quickly. You might genuinely have a good-looking first version of your website in ten minutes. The difficulty often comes later, when you already have a live website with real visitors. The more complicated your website is, the more work it takes to maintain it.
You want to change something in the design but don’t know how, and you find yourself messing with the code for hours. But the result still isn’t what you wanted.
Or you run into a technical problem (for example, the form submission doesn’t come through when someone fills it out) and you don’t know why.
Suddenly, troubleshooting the website takes much longer than generating it did.
And that’s where experience still helps. AI can guide you through problems and explain things along the way. But if you don’t understand it yourself, at some point you’re relying on the same AI that generated the code to tell you whether that code is good.
Which raises a more burning question: If something goes wrong, will you know what to do next?
So, should you build your website with AI?
I don’t think you should banish AI from your business if you want to stay authentic. But you need to find a way to use it so that it still helps you without becoming your primary decision-maker.
If you’re a therapist, photographer, consultant, coach, interior designer or another service-based business, you probably don’t need complete technical freedom when you start building your website. You just need a professional one that looks good and works well.
You might also want to see some visitor analytics, connect your sign up form with email marketing providers or you need a simple shop. But you don’t want to worry about all the technical details behind it.
You want to be able to update minor things on your website, say, six months from now without having to figure out how your own website works again.
This is where the well-known website platforms still make a lotof sense. With a platform such as Squarespace, the monthly fee isn’t simply paying for a drag-and-drop editor. Hosting is part of the service, the sites are mobile-optimised, SEO tools are built in, and customer support is available if you run into technical issues.
In other words, part of what you’re paying for is not having to become a web developer.
But choosing a traditional website builder doesn’t mean you have to ignore AI. You can still use it to organise your ideas, brainstorm the page structure, come up with catchier headlines when you’re stuck, or let it explain something technical you don’t understand.
You can and should incorporate AI into your process because it helps with and speeds up a lot of tedious tasks. Just don’t confuse using AI with handing over every decision to AI.
And there is another option somewhere in the middle: starting with a website template.
A good website template gives you a thoughtfully designed structure to work from. Instead of deciding from scratch how the overall website should look, you have a foundation that you can make your own with your colour palette, typography, images and content.
For many small businesses, I think this combination makes a lot of sense.
