It’s simple:
- Buy a domain name (starting at €10).
- Purchase hosting with enough storage (around €40 or more).
- Enter a prompt into an AI tool to generate your website.
In less than an hour, you have a brand-new website you can use for your business. But there are drawbacks that could cost you more than you actually save.
For freelancers just starting out or small businesses looking to complement their social media presence with a more organized portfolio, a website can be incredibly useful. One of the biggest concerns, however, is the price tag, which may be difficult to fit into a business budget. At Vavřík Studio, we understand this challenge, but we want to warn you about something we’re seeing more and more often.
What Are the Drawbacks of an AI-Generated Website?
The website may look beautiful at first glance. We don’t deny that. But your customers and clients may notice when an AI-generated website looks generic, feels cheap, or doesn’t work properly. Here are three ways an AI-generated website could hurt your business.
1. The Money You Save Could Cost You Customer Attention
We see plenty of businesses talking about how they use AI, how much money it saves them, and how innovative their processes are. At Vavřík Studio, we understand this approach and agree with it to a certain extent. But we believe that earning the attention of customers and clients is something a business shouldn’t cut corners on. Customers can recognize AI-generated websites, and they may see them as a cheap, lazy way for a business to promote what it sells. If customers or clients don’t respond well to an AI-generated website, the business could lose more than it saves.
That’s why we focus on making every website we create unique. We don’t generate websites from AI prompts or look for cheap shortcuts that leave your customers feeling like you’re cutting costs at their expense. However, we understand that not everyone starting a business can afford to spend several thousand euros on a well-designed, functional website. The question is whether you need a website at all at the beginning, or whether social media might be enough to get you started.
Once the people around you get used to the fact that you’re running a business and have a website, however, your growth may begin to slow. At this stage, the impression your website makes on people who don’t know you becomes crucial. A cheap AI-generated website could prevent new customers from connecting with what matters most: your brand identity.
At Vavřík Studio, we help redesign generic, template-based websites so visitors can recognize and appreciate what makes your business distinctive. We do this by working with our clients on branding that connects their identity across every aspect of their business, including their website.
2. Website Functionality Could Become Your Worst Nightmare
Technical and design debt can catch up with you when you use an AI-generated website. A €100 website could turn into a repair project costing thousands of euros after just a few months. Website functionality often depends on details that an AI prompt may not get right. This can affect the customer experience and damage your business’s reputation. Even something as small as an incorrectly configured button can send customers anywhere except where they’re supposed to go. Generic copy could also hurt the website’s indexing, SEO, and visibility in AI-powered search. There are many more examples.
With a larger website or online store, these problems can cost you more than money. They can also cost you the trust of your customers and clients. AI-generated websites may include unnecessary elements that slow them down. Visitors can also become so lost on the website that they struggle to understand what it offers or what they’re supposed to do.
At Vavřík Studio, we create websites that don’t overwhelm visitors or compromise performance with unnecessary text, images, or features. We work exclusively with WordPress, which offers many advantages but also comes with certain limitations. We also believe that AI cannot replace the expertise needed for more complex website functionality, so staying in close contact with specialists in this field matters to us. Our entire website was built in WordPress and incorporates 3D modeling.
At the beginning of this article, we mentioned something you should watch out for. Generating a website yourself, as described above, is one thing. Paying hundreds or thousands of euros for the same website you could have generated yourself is another.
3. You Could Pay More Than You Need To
Imagine someone offers to build you a website for €400, but all they do is buy a domain and hosting, quickly generate a generic website, and push additional overpriced services that your website supposedly needs to function properly. Now that you know how easy it is to generate a website with AI and the risks this could create over time, we encourage you to be careful about who you trust with your website.
A quality website costs money, and it isn’t always necessary when you’re just starting a business. It’s better to wait and invest in quality and functionality. At Vavřík Studio, we value the quality of our own work and the work of other professionals in our industry who share our approach. Our goal isn’t to churn out a million websites and get rich doing it. We want the finished product, whether it’s a website or another project, to deliver real quality and function as it should.