Fixing AI-built websites in the UK

Who this is for

I'm not going to lie, like most people in the tech space, we use AI in our day to day work. This page was researched and its structure was planned for me, and I just filled in the gaps. However, some of the initial suggestions felt off, and over a decade of working on sites gives you that feeling. I re-prompted and looked at the generated HTML. It looked fine, but I've been to amusement parks before. On the third attempt, it got it right.

The law of threes is pretty common. Even before AI took over writing software, it was assumed that three attempts at something would get you a good result (“by the third time, you understand the problem”). The biggest problem with having an AI mark its own homework, while it wants to please you as fast as possible, is that it takes shortcuts.

When you ask ChatGPT to make you a plugin that imports your orders from eBay to WooCommerce, it probably works, but behind the scenes it's a mess. AIs love to add code to a problem, so left unchecked, the mess grows and grows. Before long even the AI stops following it in full, and every new change results in more existing things breaking.

One of the biggest skills you learn as a developer is to stop, look at the bigger picture and understand how a system works, what can be shared and what needs to be isolated. AI skips over this part unless you give it strict rails to follow. The plugins ChatGPT makes may work, but they can often be a ticking time bomb of issues waiting to crop up. With WordPress, you mess up something here and things over there start falling apart.

Have you built your site with tools like Lovable, Bolt, Wix AI, v0 or ChatGPT, and found that the more things you add, the more things break? This is one of those things we all learn on our web development journey. The bigger and more complex a site or app becomes, the larger the area for regressions (old things breaking) to happen.

Don't fret. This usually doesn't need a rebuild of your site, but it does need you to stop and step back. AIs want to please you, and they want to please you as quickly as possible, so the more you push for a solution, the more panicked the solutions often become. Most of the time, the structure and tools the agent has built need a little refinement and stricter guard rails.

If you need help unpicking a site that has got out of hand, or would like to talk to us about custom harnesses and development environments, please reach out for a free consultation.

What goes wrong with AI-built sites

“My site breaks when I do this.” “When I try to upload an image, this happens.” These are not new phrases. Anyone who has run a website knows them, and if you have ever hand coded one, they are a given. It's just part of the process. Systems like WordPress have the luxury of millions of users who have already made all the known errors, so there is plenty to learn from. When AI builds a site, it starts from scratch every time, so it learns little.

Blindly asking the agent to fix it (but really fix it properly this time, you promise) won't always help, and it can hide the issue. That might be fine when it's a simple thing like a slideshow or streaming a YouTube video, but a payment or login system is different. If your AI keeps making the same mistakes and every day is like playing whack-a-mole, reach out. We have decades of experience with enterprise level systems and can help.

Why your AI-built site is not on Google

As mentioned, we use AI in our workflows, but one place where we don't is content. That's not to say AI doesn't write well (compared to me... well... anyway). Google knows when your site is AI made, it knows when your images are, and it knows the dozens of near identical SEO posts are too. The web is changing and not all the old SEO tricks work.

Agents are really good at making something look good, and most users are good at saying it looks right. But as we often find with cheap imitations from Chinese marketplaces, looks can be deceiving. If you would like a full audit, please feel free to reach out.

How we fix it

Like most things in life, the honest answer is it depends. You can ask the same agent to make the same thing several times and get a different result each time. The way an agent built your site could be as easy to navigate as your garage two days after you tidied it, or it could be that drawer in your kitchen. Our approach to recovering a site AI has lost control of is to start with an investigation. The first look is free. If your site is huge, you still get a free simple summary, but a detailed review with a report is paid. Once we know the lay of the land, we can start planning together.

Fix it or start again

This is a tricky one. When you can't get that saucepan or measuring bowl from the back of the cupboard, do you sort that little section or empty the cupboards and start again? It's the same problem. If you have a new layout or a new storage system in mind, starting again makes sense. If you are just planning on keeping what you have, then it's probably best to break it up into chunks and tackle them one at a time.

That's a lot of waffle to say it depends on how bad it is and how interconnected everything is. This is not really an AI site question, it's one we as web creators face every day.

Questions people ask