Building a website with AI: what the generator does and what’s left to you

A plumber in Terrassa types “plumbing and bathroom renovation company” into a generator and, within seconds, has a website with a home page, a services page, photos of gleaming bathrooms and a contact form. It looks finished. Then he reads it carefully and sees that it offers “certified gas installations”, which he doesn’t do, that the phone number is a placeholder, and that the bathroom on the home page comes from a stock photo library and appears on plenty of other sites in the trade.

That’s what an AI website generator does well, and also what it doesn’t do. It builds the structure, the design and a first draft of the copy from a short description. All it knows about your business is what you tell it, and if you tell it little, it fills in the rest with what a similar company usually has. This guide covers both halves of the job: the part the tool handles and the part that’s down to you.

Which generator to choose: where the site lives and who controls it

Almost every generator produces a decent first draft from a single sentence, so the difference between them lies in what happens next: where the site lives, who controls it and what it costs you to leave if you ever want to switch.

There are two families. Builders with their own hosting, where the site only exists inside the platform, and those that generate the site on WordPress, which is free software and can be moved from one provider to another.

Wix, Hostinger and GoDaddy: quick to set up, hard to leave

Wix has a conversational generator: you describe your business and what you want to achieve, and it gives you back a complete website, which you can keep changing with the assistant or by hand, dragging blocks around. Hosting is included. You can start for free, but to use your own domain you need a paid plan, and that’s worth knowing before you show the site to anyone at an address like “yourname.wixsite.com”.

Hostinger has its own AI builder, which also starts from a one-sentence description and is then edited visually, with domain, hosting and SSL certificate included in the plan. GoDaddy offers Airo, which generates pages, starter copy and images from a description of the project.

The weak spot of this family is the exit. Wix says so in its own help center: the site can’t be exported to another hosting provider because it runs on Wix technology and only on Wix servers. The content is yours, you can take the text and photos with you, but the website itself stays behind. For an SME that wants something up and running this week and has no plans to migrate, that’s not a problem. For one that already knows it will want a serious online store or integrations with its management software within a year, it is, and that’s where we would go straight to the second family.

WordPress-based generators: the site is yours, and so is the maintenance

If you want the site to be entirely yours, the way to go is a generator that builds a WordPress site. WordPress.com has an AI builder that starts from a prompt and generates pages, layout, images and copy, which you can then edit with the standard WordPress block editor. Its page states plainly that you can export the full site whenever you like and take it elsewhere.

Hostinger has a second tool, separate from its own builder, that generates a WordPress site from a description and the business name, and leaves it editable with Gutenberg or Elementor. According to Hostinger, it’s included from its WordPress Business hosting plan upwards and in all its cloud plans.

The trade-off with WordPress is that you take on more maintenance: plugin updates, backups and some security monitoring, which closed builders handle for you. If nobody in the company is going to look after that, our advice is to decide before you choose, not when the first update breaks something. Either you hire someone for it, or you go with the first family knowing what you’re giving up.

What to prepare before you open the generator

You already have most of the material the generator needs; it’s just scattered between your head, your quotes and your phone.

What you sell, where you work and how people hire you, in writing before you start

Before opening any tool, write down the real list of what you sell in a document. Service by service, using the name you give it when you talk to a customer. Next to each one, a guide price or a range if you give one over the phone, and if you never do, a sentence on how it’s calculated.

Next, your area. A local website that doesn’t say where it works loses the customer who adds the name of their town to the search and can’t find it on any page. List the towns or districts you cover, and if there are any you don’t go to, list those too.

Finally, how people hire you. Whether you need a site visit first, whether you quote over WhatsApp from photos, whether you work by appointment, whether there’s a minimum. It’s what customers want to know before they call, and it’s exactly what a generator can’t guess.

This document does double duty. You paste it into the generator as your business description, and you use it afterwards to check, page by page, that what it wrote matches. If you want to refine it, you can first give it to ChatGPT or Claude and ask it to organize it into website sections without adding anything that isn’t in the text.

Your own photos, a logo and a phone number that isn’t the placeholder

The images the generator adds are stock or AI-generated. They’re fine for a test site, not for the one a customer will see. Take photos of your premises, of your team at work and of finished jobs, on your phone and in good light, and have them in a folder before you start. A customer who sees the shopfront they’ll later find on the street trusts you more than one who sees a catalog office.

Your logo, in a file with a transparent background if you have one. If not, some generators will suggest one, and that can do to start with, although it’s best not to print it on your vans until you’re sure.

And your contact details, checked one by one. Phone, email, address, opening hours, WhatsApp link if you use it. It’s the silliest mistake and the most expensive one: a beautiful website with the placeholder phone number nobody changed.

How to build a website with AI, step by step

With the business document and the photo folder ready, the process inside the tool is short. We describe it in general terms because every platform names its buttons differently, but the order is the same in Wix, Hostinger or WordPress.com.

1. Create an account on the platform you’ve chosen. If a custom domain requires a paid plan, you can start for free and upgrade when the site is ready to go live.
2. Choose the create-with-AI option and paste in your business description. Use the whole document, not a single sentence. The more context, the less generic the copy.
3. Answer the assistant’s questions, usually about the type of site, the visual style and which sections you want. If it offers a store, bookings or a blog and you won’t use them, say no.
4. Review the first version page by page with the document beside you. Strike out every service you don’t offer, correct every price and every town.
5. Replace every image with your own photos and upload your logo.
6. Ask the assistant for changes instead of rewriting by hand when they’re about tone or structure: “make the home page copy shorter”, “add a service area section”. The facts, on the other hand, you should correct directly yourself.
7. Connect your domain and publish.

The step people skip most is the fourth, and it’s the one that separates a website that works for you from one that makes you look bad. A generator confidently writes things that are false, in the same convincing tone it uses for things that are true. No tool will warn you that your website promises a 24-hour service if you didn’t tell it so.

Allow a few hours for the whole process if you have your material ready, and several days if you’re gathering it as you go. The generation is the quick part.

After publishing: the legal side and your Google listing

Legal notice, privacy and cookies: what Spanish law requires

Article 10 of Spain’s Law 34/2002 on information society services requires anyone with a website carrying out economic activity to display the following details in an accessible way: name or company name, address, email, Commercial Registry details if any, tax ID (NIF) and, for regulated professions, the professional body and qualification. That goes in the legal notice, and the generator doesn’t know it.

The privacy policy is the other page that’s almost always missing. As soon as the site has a contact form you’re collecting personal data, and the GDPR requires you to state who processes it, for what purpose, how long you keep it and how people can exercise their rights. Platforms usually offer templates, which are a good starting point but must be filled in with your real details.

For cookies, the reference is the guide from the Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD), updated in July 2023. The point most websites fail on is that accept and reject must be given equal weight, with rejecting no harder than accepting. A banner with a big “Accept” button and the reject option hidden under “Settings” doesn’t comply. Wix and WordPress have cookie banner tools or plugins; set them up to show both buttons side by side.

If the site sells something directly, with online payment, there are further consumer obligations that we don’t cover here and that are worth reviewing with an advisor.

Google Business Profile and analytics to know if the site brings in customers

For a local business, a Google Business Profile listing often brings in more enquiries than the website itself, because it’s what shows up on Google Maps when someone searches for your service nearby. It’s free to create with a Google account, and Google requires you to verify it before you can manage it, in some cases with a video recording of your premises. Only businesses that deal with customers in person can have one, whether at premises or by visiting the customer’s home. An online-only store can’t.

Once you have it, link to your website from the listing and put the same name, address and phone number on the website as on the listing, written exactly the same way. Differences between the two confuse both Google and customers.

The other piece is measurement. Add your site to Google Search Console, which is free and tells you which searches you appear for and whether Google has found any errors. If you want to know how many visits end in a form submission or a call, add Google Analytics or the platform’s built-in analytics, and set up form submissions and phone clicks as events. Without that, you won’t know whether the site brings you customers or just visits.

That form submission you’re already tracking as an event is also where the job stops being the website’s. A form that lands in an inbox nobody checks is a lost customer, and connecting it to your calendar, your CRM or an automatic reply, with a tool like n8n, is already automation. In a small SME it usually goes undone, and it’s the first thing we would set up: making sure every enquiry reaches a specific person and gets a reply, even if it comes in out of hours.

If you want your AI-generated website to be the front door to your sales operation rather than a brochure, tell us what happens today with every enquiry you receive.