AI Website Builder or a real Web Designer?

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 to make it take off. I actually had a list of agencies and wanted to sign them all up to help each other in regional areas maintain government funded projects and to keep our jobs in Regional Australia for agencies and creatives that lived in the areas. 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. We see this with online shopping as well. 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. I wish I’d learnt how to be a plumber instead of doing IT at uni.

Why do people want an AI Website builder?

It may be obvious for most, they think it’ll save time and money and get something with minimal effort they’ll be happy with. Neither of these two things actually happens because there’s a gap between how a quality site is built and what an AI one produces.

What is the gap that makes Website AI builders fail?

But first a simple question, who cares about the backend of a website being usable, scalable and maintainable?

Answer: The web developer. It’s the web developer who cares about the quality of systems and what’s being built.

Designers don’t care as long as it looks like their pretty design. Designers work on handing over work and getting paid not on maintaining or systems. They can’t make money out of selling properly structured HTML or scalable design code.

Customers also don’t care until they have to edit the site or if somethings broken.

The gap here that means AI generated sites aren’t great maintaining or scaling. The fact they don’t reuse existing frameworks, systems and plugins that may exist within an ecosystem that’s been refined and setup by the web developer to be optimised for things that matter technically.

You see we ask AI to generate code that comes with it’s own styling of an element which could be text, headings or an image unfortunately the styling is applied in a block of css as pure unreadable code. Maintain that easily?!

Best case the css is on the element such as a title or image but there’s a lack of integration with styling properties with custom classes and the global site style variables/tokens and inheritance meaning there’s no cohesion throughout the website that makes change and maintenance easier. Again the designer doesn’t care until they need to edit it and same goes for the customer. At some point in time the efficiencies generated by AI is overtaken by the time needed to unravel some of the problems with pasting bulk css code. I’ll touch more on this with the UI Brain UX builder.

Who are AI Website Builders for?

They’re like a toy you buy from Kmart, you’ll give it a go try it but once it doesn’t meet your expectations you’ll discard it. Who works to meet your expectations? Real people, web designers and developers work to deliver results that are scalable and maintainable so in the future they’ll save time and money for the customer.

AI Website builders for short term gain and real people for long term gains.

Large sites in particular are not suitable for AI website builders.

If you have a website built by AI the lower end of the market those people also currently using DIY web builders like SquareSpace will turn to developers and ask them for help. The answer is from my side of the house, yes and no. Yes, of course i’ll fix it by starting again. No, I won’t try to unpack the clunky nature of your AI site without spending countless hours your not willing to pay for.

What needs to change for AI Website Builders to be useful?

AI website generators need to exist within the content management system being used and not an add-on. We so often see the AI tools not having a close enough understanding around the website you wish to create. For me this looks like the use of a styling framework together with a knowledge of systems such as naming standards that align to block element modify BEM naming standards.

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. Love it.
• 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.
• Video AI – with tools like Artlist we can produce a professional video with multiple scenes just by using AI prompts. The quality here is good while it’s a bit pricey it’s worth the money.
• 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 you need to know what these 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 site look and feel professional and use a seperate 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 packages 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. During my Christmas holidays I had a bit of fun with a few that were recommended to be my ChatGPT.

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. 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 from existing CSS. 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 and I do mean everything 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’s developer focused which I was thinking was good another tool in the tool belt. The purpose of this article though is to see what tools and categories exist in the AI builder space.
  
  Only freshly released in October 2025 you can use it and ChatGPT to get some pretty amazing outcomes. What I was most impressed with was 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, AI 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. more detail to follow.

Is the hybrid UI Brain X builder the AI answer?

Sadly no, I was super excited about this when I first saw that we could export to multiple builders Elementor, Divi, Bricks, Gutenburg and that settings would be put into the correct fields for styling. The tool is quite amazing for generating or cloning designs but again we end up with a mix of styling properties and raw CSS in blocks that is challenging to edit. It’s not aligning itself to best practice website building but design and again customers and designers don’t care about the backend unless it’s going to save or make them more money or if something appears broken.

What I would prefer to see here is this builder give us the option to simple create content and structure without the styling and leave the styling to the custom classes built with BEM and global styling frameworks like Automaticcss or Tailwind. I’d much prefer to spend a few more hours assigning classes to containers and elements together with global style tokens that can be changed at anytime easily.

UI Brain X starts with AI credits, I went for the LTD with 80 credits and started cloning, a page from an existing site, a single AI prompt will consume credits one page at a time adding up fairly quickly. Unfortunately as I previously mentioned pasting into Bricks or any other builder will package up necessary css into code blocks.

The tool knows nothing of ACSS or post types and it’s a bit too much to expect that it would do this cleanly even if you trained it around your architecture, performance is not a factor here. I was however hoping for the best and that it would put the properties of an element such as padding, sizing, colour all into the correct element property. I could copy these to a defined BEM custom class and reuse that same class elsewhere. No such luck.

Use Case 1

It’s no secret we’re not a fan of large local digital marketing businesses like Thrive or Localsearch they generally build their sites with Duda and charge more than I do packaging things up like a buffet of fuzzy technical features customers don’t necessarily understand or even use, such as CRMs and local SEO tolols they must have. I learnt quickly here these companies are setup to block the AI rebuilders so developers like me can’t migrate sites easily to an open source site like WordPress. Duda isn’t quite as portable as a WordPress or open source site once your on there like SquareSpace your stuck. They do offer to export your content but I don’t know if this is pure html or as a text and image package. This really should be illegal, a customer pays for a site to be built, they own the site but not the platform they rent to use, effectively they own the content only and are unknowingly locked in to ongoings with the one provider.

It’s a lot more work to rebuild sites from scratch than it is to clone it via an AI cloning tool like UI Brain X. Still for a 5 pager I can rebuild manually in about 4 hours and I end up with a tech stack that is maintainable and scalable and will be designed with a more consistent look and therefore be more professional .

One thing I’ve found UI Brain X will do if a site is blocking it is redesign the site with knowledge it can acquire other ways. I tried this with a Fabrications website in Cairns, unfortunately I found that it wasn’t accurate with content and structure as it couldn’t access the site properly.

Working around 403 Forbidden issues with proprietary builders and sites with ChatGPT

For anyone who knows me I’m persistent and so if there’s a way I’ll find it. With this problem, I thought a screenshot of the entire page would do what I needed but this just presented other problems.

What worked really, really well was using the Mac app SiteSucker then uploading this onto a platform I host. This in the first instance gives us a static copy that is difficult to update and time consuming. If you then ask AI to redesign or clone the site you’ll end up with something you can copy and paste into WordPress Bricks Builder. This is the quickest way to migrate a Duda type site, if you ask for a redesign you’re also not going to get into any trouble with creative copy write protections over the theme the customer used to build heir website.

Use Case 2

We have some old Drupal 7 & 8 sites we manage for clients, not very many, only about 10 are left from my original 36 just a few years ago. I’ve already rebuilt or completely redesigned most of these from the ground up from 2023 – 25.

One I still have on the old platform is called Kooringal Stud, almost 15 years old and still not a bad looking design and mobile friendly. The customer didn’t want to spend any money on the site and so if I asked for a complete redesign I risk losing them to a SquareSpace designer.

For this site I was easily able to clone it over to Bricks and WordPress in the space of 1 hour what would have taken most likely 5-6 due to the content. For those of you developers out there I usually wouldn’t recommend rebuilding using a design that is aged but if the customer is happy with the site and it’s not used for generating leads you can sometimes get away with it.

What a free rebuild does together with some training is increases your customers loyalty and shows that you care for their business. As a developer you can get another 5-10 years out of your relationship with them as a result of spending that couple of hours re platforming.

Final Thoughts on AI Web Builders

My job as a web developer for medium to large sites isn’t going away any time soon with some basic research I thought for sure my time was coming soon but with this article and some research I’m happy to report I’ll be in business for a while yet.

For those smaller customers eventually things may get there with AI as they do their one update per year and have very little care around how things are built. The difficulty we now face is misleading education from marketing telling people how easy it is to build a site with AI but thankfully they don’t tell us how easy it is to maintain a site built on AI.