Got a call from a client. He was frustrated. He’d spent the weekend with one of those new WordPress AI site builders and ended up with a site that looked fine. Just fine. Generic, that typical AI polish, and it didn’t feel like his brand at all. “I thought this was supposed to be the future,” he said. “But every prompt I give it makes it worse.”
So I asked to see his prompts. They were exactly what you would expect. “Make a cool website for a book blog.” “Change the colors to something modern.” It is the old developer line: garbage in, garbage out.
My first instinct was to scrap the whole thing and rebuild from scratch. I have seen my share of page-builder messes and AI-generated code that is impossible to maintain. But then I looked closer. The structure the AI had built was not that bad. The tool was not the problem. The instructions were.
Treating AI like a junior dev, not a magician
You can’t just give vague instructions to a junior developer and expect them to read your mind. You have to be specific. You have to define the requirements, the layout, the brand voice, everything. This is how you have to handle WordPress AI prompts. You’re not making a wish; you’re writing a spec. The folks over at the official WordPress.com blog posted a guide on this recently, and it drives home the same point: specificity is everything.
Instead of just asking for a “cool blog,” you need to provide a detailed brief. Think about all the things you’d tell a human developer before they write a single line of code.
// Vague prompt that gets you a generic site:
"Build a modern website for a book review blog."
// A specific, dev-level prompt that gets results:
"Create a WordPress website for 'Rochi's Book Corner.' The target audience is millennial and Gen Z book lovers. The tone should be modern, fun, and welcoming. Use a muted green and off-white color palette. Generate five pages: Home, About, Contact, Book Reviews, and Industry Trends. The 'Book Reviews' page must feature a 3-column post grid pulling from the 'reviews' post category. All buttons should be rounded, not square."See the difference? The first is a wish. The second is a set of instructions. It defines the brand, the structure, the audience, and even specific design choices. That is how you get a result that fits instead of a generic template.
So where does this leave us?
These AI tools aren’t a replacement for having a clear vision for your site. But they can be a massive accelerator for getting the first draft done. If you treat the AI like a capable-but-literal junior dev, you can save yourself days of tedious setup work. Just remember a few ground rules:
- Front-load the details. Your first prompt should be your most detailed one. Give it the name, purpose, pages, style, and tone all at once.
- Iterate one piece at a time. Don’t try to change the layout, colors, and fonts in a single prompt. Tweak one element, see the result, then move to the next.
- Know when to go manual. For fine-tuning, sometimes it’s faster to just open the block editor and adjust a setting yourself. The AI is for the heavy lifting, not for nudging a block two pixels to the left.
Look, this stuff gets complicated fast. If you’re tired of debugging an AI’s mess and just want a site that works and represents your business properly, drop my team a line. We’ve definitely seen it before.
An AI builder is a tool, and a powerful one. It will not build a great site for you on its own. It builds the site you tell it to build, so you had better get good at telling it what you want.
