How to Use AI to Build Your Own Website

Credit: Framer

Generative AI tools are now finding their way into everything from movie making to home renovation, and another task that these supercharged models can take on is website design. You don't need to code a single line of HTML—or even know what HTML is—to get something sleek and shiny published on the web.

The idea is the same as it is with creating text or images: You type in a prompt, and the AI works its magic to produce something along your guidelines. You can specify the purpose of your website and the visual style it should have, as well as the individual elements (like images and menus) you want on the page.

You'll find AI popping up in a lot of different website-building services now, and I've picked out three of them to take a look at what is and isn't possible, if you let artificial intelligence build a website for you.

Bear in mind that there is another way to create websites with AI, which is to get your AI chatbot of choice to generate HTML code. This will take more time and effort, and you might have to deal with a few bugs and inconsistencies along the way, but it does give you more control over the look of your final site.

Wix

The AI-powered Wix website builder springs into action as soon as you open an account (though you have the option to put your website together using more traditional methods, if you prefer). It takes the form of a series of questions about the site you want to create: The site title, the content it's going to display, the different features you need, and any particular messages you need it to get across.

It's not dissimilar to having a conversation with ChatGPT or Gemini, and after every prompt you can have the AI rephrase the question or give you some assistance in answering it (basically, suggestions for what to say). It doesn't take long to work through and it feels like having a conversation with an actual web designer.

When you're done with the initial conversation, you can continue to use generative AI to produce text and images for your website's pages, and to specify a layout and a theme: Just describe what you want to see, and Wix tries its best. Every time a website look is generated, you can start again from scratch, make tweaks that are more minor, or accept the design and carry on.

The AI websites Wix produces are a bit like the AI text and images we're now used to: polished enough, but rather generic and bland. You don't get much control over details, and it's sometimes difficult to get elements in the places you want—though you can of course use the AI-generated pages as a start and then add your own edits. Wix and its AI tools can be used for free, but paid plans (from $17 per month) are also available.

Framer

Framer offers a host of advanced website building tools as well as AI components, so it's a good option if you want to hand over some of the job of creating your site to artificial intelligence, but still have the option to take a lot of manual control too. You can use AI to create everything from a tagline to entire pages.

All you need is a prompt, like "a website page for a tech writer that's clean and minimal, with space for a large header image"—that gets you something pretty usable and professional right away. Any element created by AI can be regenerated again from the same prompt if needed, and edited manually too.

AI can also suggest suitable combinations of colors across your site, and I like the way you can quickly cycle through different color schemes and font styles, to instantly change the look of your site. As yet there isn't any AI image generation—so you'll need to bring your own, or use stock images through the site. 

The AI built into Framer can get you great-looking websites in mere seconds, and the prompts seem to be well-followed on the whole. The end results can lack a bit of originality and inspiration, but that's where the manual editing controls come in, which are comprehensive. You can get started for free, with paid plans starting at $5 per month.

Hostinger

Sign up for Hostinger, and you get the option to create your entire website with just a site type, a site style (such as "minimal" or "bold"), and a text prompt: You'll then get a selection of pages based on that prompt. The more specific you are the better, and we managed to get decent results from just a few lines of text—albeit results that looked like a lot of existing websites (which is the nature of AI, really).

When you get into the details of editing your website, there's an AI-generated text writer that works much like ChatGPT or Google Gemini: You supply the prompt, and Hostinger provides the text. The quality here doesn't quite match up to the best AI chatbots out there, so you might want to generate your words somewhere else, and paste them in.

The AI generation capabilities of Hostinger extend to images and logos, as well as entire webpages, so it's just about the most fully featured option we've seen in terms of the built-in AI. It's all straightforward to use, though as is always the case with AI prompts, you might find your written instructions aren't quite enough to get exactly what you want.

You can't use Hostinger for free, unfortunately: Prices start at $11.99 a month, though you'll often get a discount on the first few months, and there is a 30-day money-back guarantee attached. You're also limited in terms of the AI images you're able to create for free, and you might find you have to start paying for extra credits if you need a lot of pictures produced via AI.