AI-Powered Website Building: How To Create a Professional Site

If you’re thinking about building a website with AI, follow along with my nine-step walkthrough:

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1. Decide Your Site’s Purpose

First, you need to determine what your site is about and who you’ll be serving. This is the research stage of the process, so consider these factors:

• Your niche and purpose (for example, to share expertise about gardening, or sell haircare products)
• Your target audience
• The goals of your business
• Your brand personality and values
• The market research you’ve done

The more information you can provide to an AI tool, the better quality result you’ll receive. And, having this data to hand is essential when navigating an AI builder and its setup questions. For example, Wix’s chatbot will dig into your goals, audience, and what you want from your site in order to build a site profile.

2. Choose Your AI Tool

There are two main paths for building a website with AI: use an LLM or pick an AI website builder. I’ll discuss the pros and cons of both options below:

Use an LLM

There are plenty of AI tools available to help you produce a professional site, including LLMs (Large Language Models). These include familiar names like ChatGPT. To ask for help, simply describe what you want with an AI-friendly prompt or ask a direct question. For example:

• Tell me how to create a website for my hairdressing business
• What should I include on a product page?
• What are the best booking tools to add to my website?

Generally, you’ll need to use a combination of tools in order to develop an entire website. That’s why picking an AI website builder is better, since you can manage and access everything from a single dashboard.

Use an AI Website Builder

AI website builders are a smart option if you’re looking to build a professional site. They make building a website accessible and affordable, no matter your site’s purpose or your skill level.

When comparing AI website builders, there are a few key things to look out for:

• How easy is it to use?
• Does it save you time or create more work for you?
• Does it have the features you need?
• Can you add extra functionality with add-ons or app integrations?
• Is there a pricing plan that suits your budget?
• Can you create content and visuals with AI?

After hands-on testing and hundreds of hours of in-house research, Wix is my top choice for 2025. I used Wix’s AI website builder and found the process intuitive and user-friendly, with the end result being a personalized dashboard and template based on my site profile. Plus, Wix provides a growing suite of AI features.

➡️ Wix’s pricing ranges from $17 to $159 per month (billed annually), but you can test out its AI website builder with its free plan first.

Wix is the best AI website builder

I’ve tested the top AI website builders this year, and Wix offers the best range and quality of AI features.

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3. Design Your Site

Once you’ve chosen your AI website builder, it’s time to design your site’s look. You’ll usually be asked for some general information about your site to shape your custom template, which is why determining your brand’s purpose and identity is so important.

AI website builders take different approaches. For example, Hostinger asks you to fill out a brief prompt to generate a template personalized for you, while Squarespace has takes you through a guided web design process with its Blueprint AI builder. However, Wix’s conversational chatbot builder and designer feel very natural to use, and would be my go-to recommendation.

For example, when using Wix’s AI website builder, I was asked about my website name, my business goals, the types of products I want to sell, my audience, and my unique selling point. Wix then translated this into a personalized site profile and dashboard, meaning I had the apps and features I needed to get started.

📢 Be warned: If you don’t use an AI website builder to design your site, prepare for a more manual and costly task. You could hire a professional designer to do the work for you (which is more expensive than using an AI website builder), or ask for help from a separate AI tool (such as ChatGPT), but you’ll then need to apply its suggestions to your website yourself.

4. Customize the Generated Site

Now that you’ve got your custom template, you can dive into your AI website builder’s editor to refine your pages.

I could tell Wix’s AI builder to tweak a lot of the design for me, including the color scheme and homepage layout. For example, my initial site theme was really dark, so I asked for a “light pastel theme” instead. My template preview updated in seconds.

Wix also uses the popular drag-and-drop editor, meaning I could manipulate and move elements wherever I wanted on the page. So, it was easy to fix any issues I had with the AI’s creation.

5. Create Content

AI can do so much more than just build a website for you. It can also help populate your site with generated content and brand assets, such as:

• Text
• Images
• Videos
• Color schemes
• A business logo
• A business name

If you’re building an online store, you can use AI for ecommerce purposes too. For example, I could create AI-generated product descriptions that matched my site’s tone of voice and included target keywords.

6. Consider UX

Design is important, and first impressions do matter when it comes to websites, with most people forming an opinion about a site in just 0.05 seconds! But however good-looking your website, it won’t succeed unless you can also provide a positive user experience to visitors and customers.

You can use AI to improve and monitor your site’s overall user experience, whether that’s delivering unique and interactive content or optimizing how a visitor gets from point A to B.

With Wix, businesses can deploy dynamic AI features, such as the AI chatbot to help manage and process customer queries 24/7, or Wix’s product recommender, which shows related items to customers to help them find what they need, and boost sales.

7. Test Responsiveness and Functionality

Next, you need to review what you’ve worked on. Preview your work in the editor, see how your site looks on different devices, and double-check that all of your links, videos, and dynamic elements work.

You don’t want your site to lag or crash when someone visits it either, so assess your website’s load times and review the size of your assets to see if anything needs compressing or removing.

I also recommend sharing your unpublished site with colleagues, friends, and family. When you’re working closely on something, it can be hard to see the full picture, so use this tactic to get valuable feedback ahead of launch day.

Author's advice...

Testing doesn’t stop once you’ve published your site. You need to check in regularly to see what’s working and what needs improving. Gather feedback from visitors, analyze performance data, and stay on top of trends to make sure your website doesn’t fall behind others in the market.

Emma Ryan Lead Writer

8. Optimize SEO and Performance

Once you’ve built your website, you can use AI in SEO to optimize your pages and content for search engines. Here are a few ways you can use AI to help with SEO and performance:

• Review keywords to find content opportunities and boost rankings
• Identify on-page improvements, such as adding metadata or streamlining your site’s navigation
• Build links into your content to boost brand authority, crawlability, and the user experience
• Generate reports with AI analytics so you can track data, such as your site’s performance, traffic, sales, and visitor behavior

Nowadays, you also need to prepare your site for Google’s AI Mode and AI Overviews. These AI-powered elements are dominating the search landscape, and taking up prime positions in the SERPs (search engine results pages). Google suggests optimizing videos and images, checking your technical SEO, and doubling down on the EEAT (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) of your content to show your experience and expertise.

Use Wix AI for SEO support

Wix offers AI-powered tools to help optimize your site, including its AI meta tag creator.

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9. Publish and Promote

After completing these steps, your website should be ready to go live! You can spend as long as you need tweaking and adjusting your site’s pages and elements, but the work isn’t over once you hit that “Publish”  button.

You need to spread the word about your site and promote your brand widely, whether that’s through email campaigns or social media. You can use AI tools to generate social captions, schedule content, create newsletters, and even publish blog posts. These efforts can help increase your reach, increase traffic to your site, and boost engagement.

I’ve been building websites and reviewing AI builders for years. Here are a few tips I’ve picked up along the way to ensure your site remains professional:

Yes, you can build a website with AI, whether that’s with an AI website builder or LLM. Of the two options, however, I’d recommend using an AI website builder, especially if you’re new to building websites.

The best AI website builders should be beginner-friendly and flexible, helping you bring your vision to life. Thankfully, platforms like Wix offer AI tools to help build your site pages, generate content, and monitor performance. And, after this year’s round of testing, Wix is my go-to choice if you’re looking for a high-quality and responsive AI builder. You can try it out for yourself with its free plan!