Stop Using ChatGPT To Build Your Website For You! It's Not Working...

Disclaimer

I'm going to be frank here. I use AI every single day when I'm coding. I even used ChatGPT's DALL-E features to generate the banner for this post.

The State Of AI

At the time of writing this, ChatGPT has been available to the public for a few years now, and AI website generators are everywhere. Type a description of your business, hit enter, and watch a full website materialize in under a minute. Do you know what that means? It means we've hit the era of AI incest or AI echo chamber. AI has officially started learning from the crappy, bloated, misleading code produced by itself over the past few years.

Now to be fair, people have been shipping low quality garbage websites since the internet's inception. But at least the garbage builders had to take time to produce garbage back then because we didn't have AI to speed-run that process for us.

I Am A Hypocrite

My journey with building websites using AI assistance looks a lot like this meme template: beginners never use ChatGPT, mid level users always use ChatGPT, and experts never use ChatGPT.

I feel guilty writing this post now because I'm guilty of leaning on AI in my own workflow. In fact, about a month ago I was ready to write a post about how to use ChatGPT to build your website. This post will technically inversely answer that question.

ChatGPT Is A Tool, Not A Crutch

Just like a spell-checker is pretty useless if you feed it gibberish or nothing, ChatGPT is also useless if you ask it to come up with results without any guidance.

I use ChatGPT in my programming to save me time by writing unit tests and e2e tests for me. I sometimes also use it to build out UIs for me after feeding it the context of what I'm currently using. There have been a bunch of scenarios where I know exactly what I want to accomplish but don't feel like remembering the syntax so ChatGPT comes to the rescue. I've even used it as a sounding board for ideas at crazy hours of the night when nobody else is awake to talk to me.

In all these scenarios it helps me accomplish my goals. Sometimes it gets the job done very well, and sometimes it misses the ball completely. The problem comes in when you blindly trust it.

I used to play a game where I'd hit the autocomplete button on my phone to see what strange nonsensical string of words it would produce. The results made less sense than the drunkest text I had ever received. This autocomplete button works great to speed up typing, but unguided it becomes worthless.

The biggest problem here is that ChatGPT can "look right", and that will mask broken, bloated code underneath.

The Problem With Using ChatGPT To Build Your Website For You

Building a website by hand has always been a great way to make sure every line of code exists for a reason. It forces you to understand your structure, your performance, and your SEO. A big part of web development is knowing why something works — not just that it appears to.

This is where the issue of AI generated websites crops in. People — especially business owners in a hurry — are lazy. When you ask AI to generate an entire website for you, you are opening yourself up to shipping code that you don't really understand. This means that you have no way to vet whether or not the site you're generating is actually fast, accessible, or optimized for search engines. In the context of web development, the generated code can also rely on outdated techniques and abandoned libraries.

Horror Story Examples

I reviewed a site the other day that a business owner had generated with an AI builder. I'm not going to link to it because I hope it gets rebuilt. The site "looked" legit but under the hood it was full of code that would have been acceptable for a developer in 2018. The problem was that it loaded entire JavaScript libraries for features the site didn't even use, and shipped over 300KB of CSS when the pages needed maybe 30KB. If the person who generated that site had actually read the code, they would know this. In fact, even the parts that worked were held together by markup no sane developer would want to maintain.

On another AI-generated site, I found metadata claiming the site was optimized for search, right above a wall of divs nested inside divs nested inside divs:

This website follows SEO best practices to ensure your business outranks competitors in search engine results.

This is just blatantly incorrect. If you know anything about SEO you would know that a slow, bloated site with no semantic markup and no real content strategy will have absolutely no chance of outranking a well-built competitor. In this case you can see that dodgy misleading promises can creep in everywhere.

Conclusion

Using ChatGPT to build your website for you is only going to hurt you in the long run. Use it as a tool, not a crutch.

Do your part in preventing the rise of low quality websites by calling them out to prevent others from blindly trusting whatever an AI generator spits out. And be careful yourself not to be misled by a site that "looks right" but isn't.