Should I Rebuild My Website with AI? What to Consider

Welcome

Hi, welcome back to the Website Success Show. It's Jules here and if you've been tempted to rebuild or update your website using ai, then this episode's for you.

I'm not gonna name any names, I'm not gonna name the business that I am talking about, but I had an email this week.

A big brand rebuilds its website with AI

So a big well-known brand has just rebuilt their website entirely using ai. And I have definitely had some feelings around the use of AI with websites. You can listen to Episode 145, a I talked about the hidden costs of using AI to build your website. That episode was mainly where I had tried to use AI to create a sales page and the problems that had come up from that.

But today I am talking about actually, if you have that temptation to real rebuild your whole website using ai, because it seems like it can be quicker. It seems like it can be easier. It seems like you can get something that looks better. Very quickly, but I believe that it's not the best path for the majority of businesses and for, especially for if you've already got a website, regardless of what you, how you might feel about it.

So this brand had said that they hadn't liked their website for quite some time, and they'd been thinking about maybe changing it, never really got round to it. And then they just decided to ask an AI tool to create a new website for them. And when I clicked on the email and clicked through to the new website, I immediately was underwhelmed by it, to be honest with you.

And I think this is part of the problem.

From AI copy to AI design: the sameness problem

When AI first came out and everybody started writing copy with ai, when we all first sort of discovered the magic of it, it felt like it was amazing. It felt like it, it really got us. And it felt like it was delivering this amazing content and these amazing words that we could then use.

And then very quickly we realised it all sounded the same and there were real buzzwords that would come up. unleash. quietly, that's one that, so that's one that I see in copy quite a lot now.

Um, there's so many. There's so many. And we, we all know, we see them and it immediately makes content stand out as ai. And I feel like we're at that point right now with website design. So when I look at a site, I can very quickly see if it's a site that looks like it's been been built using ai. There are quite a few giveaways that, that I can just look at something and, and tell you that.

And I think we've had this with templates over the years. So certainly we, we've had it with, um, people using the same kind of website template and then all websites end up looking very, very similar. You can see it's a template. If you've seen that template before, if you've seen a few websites that looked like that before, then it just looks very samey, it looks very generic, very bland andvery AI generated.

Looking back with the Wayback Machine

And with this particular brand, I then used Wayback Machine, which is a website you can go to and it will show you an old version of a website.

So you can go on there, type in the URL of the website you're looking for, and it will tell you what it looked like back through the whole of the internet, which sometimes, when you look at them.

You don't always see all the images and things that are there, but it's quite an interesting thing to, to do. And I've done it before. I've looked at old websites that I, I built back in my salon days and I'm like, oh yeah, I remember when the internet used to look like that.

And maybe this what it will be, what it's like.

We'll look at the websites that are around right now and, and the sort of pre AI websites, and they may look dated in a year's time, in five years time in, in, in, you know, however long.

But I don't think that that means we should then all look exactly the same as AI generated sites tend to. I think with this particular business, I think they maybe have lost a lot of the soul of their website, when I look back at the previous version of the website

it was so on brand and obviously they feel like their brand has evolved and they feel like it wasn't on brand for them anymore, but it was immediately recognisable as a customer of this business. it felt like it was that business. It wasn't something that was just generic and could be any other business out there really.

Why AI websites are getting more generic

So that's, that's, that was one of the big issues I think with it, is the fact that AI sites are quite often very generic. And I think it's gonna get worse, I think as more people, and again, a bit like with the AI copy when, when AI first came out, as more people use it and as more people generate the same thing.

And we, and generate from generation, like AI is trained on the internet first and foremost. And that was why AI Copy felt so great to begin with because it was trained on all the great marketing, like really well thought out, really well written and documented marketing that that exists on the internet.

And it's the same thing with this where it, I mean, they, a lot of the sites look so similar. It makes me think that AI has just been trained on one particular type of website, really.

So yeah, There's not much personality in it and there's not much uniqueness about that particular business. So I think it's a shame. I think it's a real shame that that that get then is getting lost. And our own unique humanness, our own uniqueness of our business is getting diluted with all of the AI stuff. And I do honestly believe that this is the only way we'll be able to stand out in the future is if, if we actually keep what's unique about us and we keep our own quirks and our own, um, you know, it doesn't have to be perfect.

And I think sometimes with these AI sites, they definitely aren't perfect. But when you have a first look at them, they sometimes can look like they are a much more polished version of a website that, that maybe already exists.

You probably don't need a brand new website

And I've had the conversations so many times over the years of, you probably don't need a brand new website.

Talked about this back in episode one, three. Three is a new website really the answer? And a lot of people come to me and they'll say, oh, don't look at my website. It's terrible. I, and they think that they need a new one. They think that they've got to change everything, and that then causes all sorts of problems.

And I think my goal for this episode is if you listen to this episode and you've been considering maybe that shiny object of well, I could maybe just get a new website and just get AI to generate it for me.

And I want to save you the pain of doing that. And then realising that any existing traffic and domain authority that you have already, you may then lose, or you, it then still doesn't solve the problems that your existing website had.

So I don't want you to be one of those people who come to me after the fact where you've changed your website and then you've still got problems that you need to fix.

What I see after rushed rebuilds

And this is one of the most common conversations that I've had over the years with clients. And one of the most common paths for people coming in and working with me is the fact that they've had a new website built maybe that they'd either moved platforms or domains or had a brand new website built for them by somebody.

And that person hadn't then considered their traffic, hadn't considered what problems actually needed solving on the site, rather than it just needing a, a whole new redesign. And then they're in a, a worse situation than they were because they've spent all this money, or they've spent all a lot of time themselves, or they have used AI to generate something that is still not solving that problem and is still, hasn't actually sorted things out for them.

Plain but yours beats polished

So that's my goal, is that this at least makes you pause before you think about doing anything drastic with your website. And your website might feel a little bit plain and it might feel like it's not fancy and it might feel like it's boring. 'cause I think that's often a, problem that comes up where, where we look at our own website, and especially if you're designing it and you are writing the copy and you're doing it yourself, you're adding to it every week

writing blogs, you are looking at your own website regularly yourself.

It can really quickly feel like, oh, this is boring, this isn't good enough. And all of the shiny stuff that we see online doesn't help with that feeling. But a plain website that is actually yours actually speaks to your clients and actually stands out, beats a website that's really polished, and looks really sleek, but that doesn't actually align with your business and it doesn't really look like you.

The "starter site I'll fix later" trap

Now one of the things I always say, if somebody is just thinking about getting a website, is don't think about the website you need right now. Think about the website and the business that you're gonna have in a year's time, in three years time, in five years time. And you might not necessarily know what you're going to need, but I think just not thinking, oh, well I will move it or I will recreate it.

Because the last thing you wanna do, once you've set your website up and you've started building up some traffic, even if you've not done a lot with your SEO and you know the website has just been there live for a while. If you then move, if you have to move platforms, if you have to change all the code, if you have to rewrite everything on your site, change all the images, change everything about your website, then you're going to lose some of that.

It's a big cost later in your business and we might think, okay, well I'll do something now. I'll build a starter site right now and then later I will make it better, or I'll, I'll move it at a later date. But often that doesn't happen. So we think we'll do it. And then it's 3, 5, 10 years down the line and you've still got that basic site that you threw together, And never really came back and did the work to actually get it working for your business.

Building on a platform you can learn

I'm a firm believer our website is an asset for our business

And outsourcing it to AI or to somebody else. If you are getting somebody else to build your website for you without a lot of input from you is probably not doing your business much good in the long run.

It's probably better just to have something that's a simple one page site that's built in a platform that's made for building websites rather than using ai. I'm gonna come on in a minute to the, the problem with using AI to create the code for your website, but if you build it in a platform that's well established, That's designed for building websites and that you can go in and make changes easily.

And easily might not feel easy right now if you need to learn how to use your website builder. But it's something that you can learn

And there's plenty of help out there to actually be able to learn how to use it. So it's regardless of whether you decide, okay, I do I wanna pay somebody else to do that for me, then you can, and you're not dependent on one person or one type of tech to be able to then edit your website and make small changes.

And those small changes might be as simple as editing, padding around a box or changing an image or changing some of the copy, or just adding in some extra content that helps your website to to work better, helps it to show up more in searches, helps to improve the SEO, whether that's behind the scenes with things like your page titles and your headings, or is that the actual copy that's there on your website?

Prompting AI for every change, and the environmental cost

If you need to prompt AI every time you want to make a small change like that, then It often ends up taking longer than it would do if you literally just went in and made the changes yourself. And if every change has to run through a AI as well, then there is an environmental cost to that.

Now, this is one of the political things that I'm not gonna get into on the use of AI and its cost to nature and its cost to the world, but there is a cost, and I think we need to be aware of that. We need to be aware that every prompt that we send to AI does have an environmental impact

And there's so much nuance and so many different ways that you can sway the data on whether this is the right thing, ButI think we do need to just be aware of that cost.

The security question

Now One of the big concerns is the security of AI generated websites. one of the things with WordPress is there's always updates to do because vulnerabilities come to light in the plugins and in WordPress itself, and it's the same with website builders like Squarespace and go high level whatever website builder you're you are using, things would happen, updates would happen, and it happens in the background and there are people looking for the vulnerabilities in the platforms.

But if your website is essentially hand coded by ai, so the whole of the code of your website is written specifically by AI and it can be written on code that wasn't particularly good in the first place and nobody is then checking that code, then you may not know what vulnerabilities exist in your website until it's too late.

And I don't want that to feel like sort of scaremongering really, but I think we do have to consider this. So big brands have access to lawyers, they have people probably considering things like GDPR considering what to do if they have a security breach, they have more money probably to deal with it if they do have a data breach.

And I think for a small business owner, you have to consider whether that risk of your site getting hacked and it being down to the code written by an AI that you used, whether that risk is worth it.

And it's a risk to your business. It's a risk to your customers and your clients as well and your reputation.

But as I say, you might not even know that that risk is there until it's way too late. Or you might not ever know. You might not ever realise that there's a vulnerability on your website that can then be hacked.

And you might think, well, little me is not gonna get hacked. But I've seen this myself with WordPress websites back in the day where small local charity,had WordPress websites that weren't being updated regularly, and there was a vulnerability that then got hacked.

And that site then got redirected to another horrible website, displaying the things that this charity really wouldn't want to be showing on its website. So there the vulnerabilities do exist, and if there's nobody there looking for them, if they, like with WordPress, as I say, there's a big community.

There are people, there are programmers who are actually looking for these issues. And now it's not just hackers that will be looking for these vulnerabilities in websites. The AI will also be out there looking for these vulnerabilities. And we need to think about this.

If we are thinking about just outsourcing the whole of our website to ai, really. And I think smaller businesses in particular need to have that consideration.

SEO and website migrations

There are also SEO implications with this as well. regardless of whether you have traffic to lose or not, actually it takes months or if ever actually to recover from bad website migrations. So if you've had a website already, and especially if it's been live for some time, if you've got an old website that's been live for years, then there might be things that are happening with that website that you don't want to lose.

And, you know, we all wanna try and make our, our lives and our businesses as easy and as simple as possible. And defaulting to AI won't necessarily make things simple in the long run really.

Why this topic made me uncomfortable

I've actually paused as I've been recording this. I've paused the recording a couple of times 'cause this is actually making me really uncomfortable.

Talking about this topic is making me feel uncomfortable purely because it's such a changing world and I don't want to tell people information that's not right. I very much care about the implications of what people do based on my advice. So I think my advice would be that it all feels changeable right now.

It all feels a bit overwhelming as well. Definitely. And I would advise you not to make any snap decisions on this based on a moment of ease right now and, and based on it being the easiest path to what seems like where you want to go right now. Because

regardless of whether you have a site built with AI or you build it using a tra traditional website builder, the goal is that your website is something that you can use and be proud of and is an asset for your business.

And I honestly just don't think we are there right now with AI websites and with building stuff and putting things out there into the world that we're not a hundred percent sure of the implications of doing that, whether that's the implications for our own businesses or the implications for the world as a whole.

Pause before you rebuild

So I would just advise you to, have caution with it really, and to not assume that you need a new website. You might just need to make changes to your existing website. You might just need to have a little bit of guidance on how to actually make editing your web website easier. Maybe you just need to take a step back and think about why it all feels so overwhelming and why we're all so drawn to using the easier path.

And that's part of our programming and that's part of our brains that as creatures, we are designed to look for the path of least resistance. It's our, it's our survival mechanism, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's good for us in the long run.

AI websites and junk food

And I think of AI websites a bit like junk food, where yes, it will keep you alive.

It may serve a purpose in terms of, it gives you energy and you're not gonna starve. But if that's what your whole diet was built upon, then in the long run, it's not gonna serve you. It's not gonna be healthy. And it's the same with the code underneath these AI generated websites.

Share your thoughts

So I would love to know your thoughts on this. I'd love to know if you have any strong opinions one way or another. so feel free to text the show or send me a message somewhere and, and we can start a chat about this. I would love to get more conversations going around this

So yeah, all that to say, I hope this has been helpful. So I'll see you soon. Take care. Bye.