Do you want an AI Website Builder?

I’m a web developer, it’s my job and as such you might be thinking I’m worried about not having a job in 5 years time. You’d be absolutely right and so this article will clearly have some subjectivity involved that tells you why you still need the humble web developer. Taking a step back at the end of 2025 beginning of 2026 and seeing exactly what I can do if I’m a customer is absolutely worth my time. I’ll start with some basics first though.

Why do people want AI to take over?

This is of course a generalisation and there are those that shun AI altogether while the vast majority are embracing it. I for one think that if you don’t embrace it you’ll be left behind with no job.

A few years ago I built a community website called Regional Web Developer, the site is still there and I never really pushed things out to other agencies. I actually had a list of agencies and wanted to sign them all up to help each other specifically keep our jobs in Regional Australia as agencies and creatives. I was under the assumption that people would bend over backwards to buy local regardless of the cost and that there would be loyalty there that could be relied upon. I was wrong, it’s a nice idea but honestly if it’s your own money and comparing one service to another that costs more money you’ll buy out of town every time. If it doesn’t affect me then why should I support someone else who’s clearly making enough money without me.

I raise this idea because the same loyalty exists with AI taking over jobs, nobody cares enough to actually do anything about it. We all want to spend less and get the same quality services. While all the trades seem like they’re safe AI will enhance their capabilities, efficiencies and in the end profitability.

The new/old job of a web consultant emerges

So what will this look like in 5 years as web designers and developers move into more of a consulting role. We’ll be frustrated by the AI generated crap that’s generated.

AI web generates will get better as time goes on

Yes, maybe it will at least I hope so because in 2025/26 it creates far more work than it’s actually worth from generating from the ground up. These toys are just that, something you’ll spend money on and discard or get frustrated with as you will see in my reviews below.

What’s the Marketing AI Hype?

There’s many different areas AI is engaged in and with marketers having a field day promoting their products it’s hard to see what’s actually got value under the huge “AI” heading.

As I’ll go through I’ll note where we’re currently seeing AI and where it seems to be excelling.

What categories of AI usage in Web & Examples?

• Search – AIO is our new term for 25/26 spelling out some old school SEO techniques that help AI crawlers consume our structures and content. META & Schema.
• Assisted tools for building – We see website builders with content AI generators where you put in a simple prompt and it crafts up some beautiful error free text with perfect grammar.
• Image generation – Stock photos don’t always give us exactly what we want and so we’re seeing AI generation within the web builders helping us to produce the correct vibe for our brand or message. I love that an ALT tag can also be automatically generated which is best practice SEO.
• Integration & Plugins – personally my favourite for WordPress and other CMS you can generate a plugin quickly and easily but beware the code being generated is usually insecure unless you specify vulnerabilities and know what they potentially could be. My experience only with ChatGPT.
• Full Website Builders – What a great idea lets build a complete site exactly how we want it from a prompt where it will ask you everything a web designer would ask you to come up with something that looks like a template. You’ll still need to get the photos or video that will make your sit look and feel professional and use a seprate AI tool to do the branding. I’ve tried a few of these and I can see people getting wowed initially and then after 5 minutes getting frustrated. They now need to build the same as a web developer with what’s been provided which they don’t understand how it came into being. I’ll go into these full website builders in more detail in a moment.

What are some full website builders I can still edit the content easily with after generation?

A great question as many of them will simply generate a templated pacakge really not that different to going to theme-forest and buying a theme. In order to speak with some authority it’s worth me exploring what’s there rather than just making stuff up that serves my purpose.

Below I only go through self-hosted sites built for maintainability and scalability. I don’t touch DIY platforms that focus on the user experience being nice at the expense of features. So sorry, no SquareSapce or Wix I don’t like their model or businesses.

• 10Web – I tested out 10Web hearing that you could signup at a very low expense and generate something that would work with WordPress on your own hosting. Actually this one is setup for the biggest page builder in use Elementor. In using it I quickly found it was simply a template generator with bad styling and that I’d still have to do most of what I’d normally do. I was super excited about the idea of taking a page and recreating it automatically. I gave it a try and was sadly disappointed with the results, the layout was just not very good. Alignment and spacing issues everywhere and it hadn’t been able to pull out some of my background images properly. On another page that had iframes it just didn’t generate anything at all.
• ZipWP – Again I got pretty excited this one works fairly similar to 10Web on WordPress with Elementor. Instead of trying to generate what I already had I decided to generate a fresh new site and was happier with the results compared to that of 10Web. It created all the pages and used my AI prompt to try to generate text in each page. It even generated some blogs. Everything here still needs editing or modifying and nothing would remain untouched so it begs the question did it really save me time? I’m forced into using the WP Block builder or Elementor which are both slower builders and I’m working with content I won’t be happy with.

Web Core Vitals – most people care little about the health of their website unless it means they’ll get a stead stream of customers. With not much more work and from an anonymous session I’d expect to also have some automatic caching and optimisation we saw some pretty low numbers in testing.

• UI Brain X – Nobody has heard of this one and to be clear it’s one that’s not going to put me out of business as it requires a sound technical skill and knowledge. It needs you to also go between it and ChatGPT to generate the full thing but what I was super impressed with is it’s ability to recreate a site in multiple different builders including Bricks (my choice) of builders. It still needs you to copy and paste into a blueprint site and generates a page at a time but it extracts styling information from source sites nicely and generates pure code to paste into your builder of choice. It’s not a tool an end user will pickup and say hey generate me a site but it is something that streamlines my process and allows me to still use plugins and components that are part of my stack. I was so blown away by this tool I ended up buying it. I warn you though it’s probably not one for the general public.