AI
I built my site with AI. What can still go wrong?
I build with these tools every day and recommend them. Here is the honest list of what they miss, because nobody selling you an AI website builder is going to tell you.
An AI can produce something that looks right and is quietly broken. Here is what to check, roughly in order of how often it goes wrong.
It works on your laptop and not in a hand
Most people build looking at a wide screen. Most visitors arrive on a phone. Open your site on your own phone, on cellular rather than wi-fi, and try to tap every button with a thumb.
The links go nowhere
Generated code is full of href="#" — a placeholder that looks like a link and does nothing. Click every single one, including the ones in the footer nobody reads.
The form does not deliver
This is the big one. A contact form is a piece of plumbing, not a piece of design, and a generated form frequently looks perfect and sends nothing anywhere. Fill it in yourself and confirm the message actually lands in your inbox. Then check your spam folder. Then have a friend try.
The facts are invented
These tools fill gaps with plausible material: an award, a years-in-business number, a service you do not offer, a promise about response times. Read every sentence as if a lawyer were reading it.
It is inaccessible
Grey text on a slightly lighter grey passes an AI's eye and fails a real one. Images without alt text. Buttons that cannot be reached with a keyboard. This is both a decency issue and a findability issue.
The photos are enormous
A camera photo dropped straight in can be five megabytes. Ten of those and your page takes fifteen seconds to load on a phone in a parking lot, which is where people actually look you up.
Nobody set the labels
Title still says Document. No description. No social preview. The site exists and cannot be found.
The honest summary
AI has made the building part genuinely easy. It has not made the finishing part easy, and finishing is where a website either works or embarrasses you. If you want to build it yourself and just have somebody check the plumbing before it goes live, that is a reasonable way to spend an hour.