I had a client reach out last month who was absolutely thrilled. He’d used an AI builder to spin up a site for his law firm in under ten minutes. “It’s perfect, Ahmad!” he said. Two weeks later, he was back in my inbox. The site looked like a generic template from 2005, the contact form was sending emails to a hallucinated server, and the SEO was… well, let’s just say Google didn’t know he existed. Total disaster.
The problem isn’t the AI. It’s the expectation. People think a WordPress AI website is a “set it and forget it” solution. It’s not. It’s a high-speed scaffolding tool. If you don’t know where the beams are supposed to go, the whole house is going to lean. Trust me on this.
The Trap of the “Instant” Website
My first instinct with this client was to gut the whole thing and start from scratch with a custom theme. That’s my comfort zone. But I realized I was being a bit of a dinosaur. The AI actually caught a “vibe” the client liked—the colors were decent and the layout was 80% there. The vulnerability here was my own pride; I thought I had to be the one to draw every pixel. I was wrong. The real fix was using the AI to do the heavy lifting, then stepping in as the architect to fix the structural mess.
When you’re building a WordPress AI website, you need to treat the AI like a junior dev. You give it a clear spec, you let it build the initial draft, and then you spend your time on the 20% that actually matters: performance, conversion, and clean code. This is similar to the approach discussed in the workflow over at [wordpress.com/blog/2025/12/01/how-to-create-a-wordpress-website-with-ai/].
Refining the AI Scaffolding
Most AI builders generate generic block styles. They’re fine for a hobby blog, but for a business, they lack “teeth.” I often find myself registering custom block styles to give the AI-generated content a professional edge. Instead of fighting the AI’s layout, I extend it. Here is a simple way to register a custom style for those generic buttons AI loves to generate.
/**
* Register a custom "Expert" button style for AI-generated layouts.
*/
function bbioon_register_custom_block_styles() {
register_block_style(
'core/button',
array(
'name' => 'bbioon-expert-action',
'label' => __( 'Expert Action', 'bbioon' ),
)
);
}
add_action( 'init', 'bbioon_register_custom_block_styles' );
And that was it. By adding small, surgical code interventions like this, we transformed a “cheap” looking AI site into something that actually felt like a premium brand. No total rebuild required. Just precision.
Why Strategy Trumps Tools
If you take anything away from this, let it be this: AI is a tool, not a replacement for a brain. You still need to define your audience. You still need to map your user journey. You still need to check your image alt tags. AI might generate the text, but you need to make sure it isn’t lying about your business. It happens more than you’d think.
- Be Specific: Don’t just say “lawyer.” Say “High-asset divorce attorney in Chicago with a friendly but firm tone.”
- Audit Everything: AI doesn’t know your actual email or your actual physical address. Check your forms twice.
- Custom Styles: Use standard WordPress hooks to polish the generic block output.
Look, this stuff gets complicated fast. If you’re tired of debugging someone else’s mess and just want your site to work, drop my team a line. We’ve probably seen it before.
Are you using AI to speed up your builds, or is it just creating more work for you at the end of the day?
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