Since I’ve been playing around with AI coding tools like Lovable and Bolt this question has been haunting me:
“Can AI coding replace WordPress?”
It sounds bizarre, but I’ve seen AI design and build pretty solid websites in a few minutes.
I made this construction website with Lovable, it took 1 prompt.
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Or this Marketing strategist website, also 1 prompt.
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And don’t get me wrong: these websites are simpleand it’s absolutely not at the level of what we can do with Figma and WordPress + pagebuilders
AI is simply not good enough yet to completely trust it for client projects, because it’s still lacking in many areas compared to our human skills.
But the workflow of using AI is just sooo nice. It feels flawless because you go from idea to (some kind of) result supa fast.
A prompt-first workflow vs an install-first workflow
If you want to make a website on WordPress (with a pagebuilder) you have to think about installing WordPress, themes, plugins, pagebuilders, addons. Then you build your site section-by-section by dragging and dropping widgets.
But with these new AI tools, it’s a prompt-first approach.
You don’t install anything. You don’t pick a template. You just type a sentence, and it designs and builds something for you. It’s amazing the first time you try it. You can test it out yourself here on Lovable.
It feels like skipping the first 10 steps of every web project. Because it kind of is.
And that’s also where the danger ☢️ is, because design is a lot more than just pushing pixels and making things pretty. People who are part of my Web Design with Figma course know this. The first 4 chapters of my course I don’t even open Figma because I first make sure we have a good plan before we even start designing.
Without a good plan a client doesn’t know what to do, a web designer doesn’t, and an AI also doesn’t. AI isn’t magic, even though it feels like it.
But we as humans always tend to take the road of least resistance. We want to safe our energy as much as possible because life is hard enough. That’s why building websites with AI feels so good, because it removes most of the typical WordPress headaches.
And there are more areas where AI websites are lacking:
- Design control: Want to get specific with a design, accessibility, or advanced interactions? Not really possible, these tools aren’t built for that level yet. For now it doesn’t give me the design control I want.
- Animations: There are almost no creative animations in AI generated websites. Only some simple hover animations.
- No database rollback: We may not always give WordPress credit, but WordPress is actually really good at backups, because with a proper WP hosting company you can easily rollback your website. And whenever you rollback via a backup, it backups your website and your database (your posts, images, etc). But most AI coding tools don’t do that. They only add features to the database but can’t revert them. Which is a huge downside because this means that you sometimes have to start over completely if you don’t know how to fix it yourself.
- Content management isn’t there: AI generated websites don’t have a handy backend like WordPress where you can see your pages, images, post types, etc. So even though WordPress gives you a lot of things you don’t need, there is also something nice about having everything in place. Because would you want to build a login page all the time? Post management? The answer is probably: no. But AI you start with nothing, so you even have to build your content management system. Not ideal.
- Team collaboration: WordPress has build in users system and pagebuilders often have limiting controls for clients. And AI tools? They don’t. There are some collaboration tools, but they only give prompt access to other people. This ofcourse is way too dangerous when you are working with clients.
So WordPress and pagebuilders might not be fast in setup, but they do offer a very robust system that’s scalable and safe.
So, can AI replace WordPress?
AI is awesome and I think it’s the first serious competitor to WordPress in many years, but my answer to this question is:
Not yet.
Because we simply do a lot more than just spin up simple websites, we offer full custom WordPress setups to our clients and we often help them on other fronts as well. Not just design and development.
But we have to be honest, AI isn’t a toy either anymore. It is capable of producing simple websites (design and dev) without WP, plugin licenses and updates. That’s why I think that once AI becomes better it becomes less relevant to build simple websites with WordPress. In the future WordPress will probably be used more for advanced projects that need lots of content or features.
And I don’t have the data, but I have a feeling that millions of WordPress projects are simple projects. A few static pages, maybe a blog and that’s it. That’s something that AI will be really capable of doing in a year from now. So I do think that AI is going to disrupt the WordPress market.
But if you follow my type of stuff, then you are already a lot more advanced things than just building simple websites. That’s why I am very happy that I always went into a lot of depth and was using against using templates since the beginning. Because I knew that if your only skills are importing templates and editing them, then your job was already at risk, and now even more because of AI.
Let’s upgrade ourselves.
Just having visual design and simple development skills isn’t going to be enough in the future. We need to be able to help clients in different ways, figuring out what they want, need, marketing skills, etc.
From just delivering pixels… to guiding strategy, content, and conversion.
Wait, should I change my brand name from living with pixels to something else? 🤣
So let’s not try to compete with AI, but let’s keep focussing on what AI can’t do.
If you’re curious, I recorded a full video on this, with more examples, the up and downsides and my full conclusion.
But even if you don’t watch it, I hope this email gave you something to think about.
Let’s adapt to these changing times together. As a community.
Stay smart