Should Your Business Be Using an AI Website Builder?

One of the best aspects of AI is that it can help with marketing tasks you find daunting.

In theory, those tasks would include building a website — but is AI ready for that level of responsibility? Here are three important points to consider before choosing an AI tool to help you create your business website.

Be Prepared to Get Involved

One of the biggest misconceptions about AI tools in general is that they do everything for you, but as anyone who has ever used ChatGPT can attest, AI results almost always need human oversight in order to be usable. This can become frustrating, depending on how hands-off you were hoping to be with your web design. Even with the help of AI, you’ll likely find yourself making a lot of manual decisions and tweaks like changing the placement of website elements, selecting colors and fonts, or modifying the AI tool’s proposed sitemap. Still, some may find that an AI tool does produce a good starting point from which to make those modifications. So if you’re at a complete loss about where to begin with a site design, an AI tool might help you get the ball rolling.

Keep an Eye on Optimization

You might be able to use AI to create a simple website that looks nice, but what about behind the scenes? The back end of your website contains not only the code for its appearance, but also essential SEO and accessibility elements that you wouldn’t necessarily notice. Bad optimization can not only cost you website traffic, but it can even put your business at risk. So even if you’re happy with the way your AI-generated website looks from the front, at the very least you’ll want to get an SEO expert to check out the back end to make sure that nothing is amiss.

AI Web Builders Are Pay-to-Play

Most AI website creation tools do have a free tier, but it’s usually pretty limited and almost never includes popular features like image creation. If you want advanced options and a full range of tools, you’ll have to start factoring that into your web design budget. While this may cost less upfront than hiring a web designer, you also have to consider that you get what you pay for in terms of performance. Investing in good web design from the start will often cost you less money and frustration in the long run.

Conclusion: Temper Your Expectations

In short, AI website builders can be useful to help you create a quick mockup and a visual reference to make some basic design choices for your site, especially if you’re willing to pay for advanced tools. However, when it comes to creating a full business website from scratch, AI is not yet to the point where it’s going to get everything right and meet all the necessary performance requirements. Obviously this technology is continually improving, and no doubt one day it’ll be up to the task. For now, though, it’s important to understand the limits of what AI can do in this context, and where it’s still lacking.

If one of your business goals is to create a website or overhaul your existing one before the end of the year, contact us today for a free consultation. Our team can assess where you are now, and help you make a roadmap to get your business where you want it to be in 2025.

COGO Interactive is an award-winning digital marketing agency specializing in online marketing strategy, web design, SEO and social media marketing. We work with clients in Virginia, Maryland, Washington, DC and across the nation.