Yes, you can build a website with ChatGPT or a similar AI chatbot, and plenty of people already have. Whether you should depends less on the chatbot and more on what happens after the site exists.
Part of Big Site, Small Budget, a series about how small businesses can get the kind of website that used to take an enterprise budget.
The chatbot can write the pages
It will write you a page. Ask for a home page for a bike shop and you’ll get working code and decent copy quickly. Want different colors? It’ll change them. For a simple site, the building part is within reach of anyone patient enough to keep asking.
Before you build a website with ChatGPT
The site has to live somewhere, and that’s where most of the work is.
You’ll need hosting, and a domain (your web address) pointed at it. Then there’s HTTPS, the padlock in the address bar. Most hosts set it up for free through Let’s Encrypt, but someone has to turn it on and make sure it renews.
Someone also has to keep it updated. If you end up on WordPress or anything with plugins (add-ons), those get security updates, and a site that skips them for a year is an easy target. Take a backup before each update, so a bad change can be undone.
And you’ll need to make sure people can use it. A chatbot will happily write a page that looks fine on your laptop and is hard to read on a phone, or impossible for someone using a screen reader. It won’t mention it, because you didn’t ask.
If you’re confident about all of that, go for it. A lot of small sites only need to tell people what you do and how to reach you, and you can build that yourself.
Where it stops being a weekend project
Logins, payments, bookings and forms that store customer information are a different ball game. A mistake on a brochure page is embarrassing. Get one of these wrong and you can leak your customers’ data or lose money, and you may not find out until someone else does.
If your site needs any of those, that’s real software, and it’s worth having someone who builds it for a living. We build custom software for small businesses, with an engineer checking every part a chatbot shouldn’t be trusted with on its own.
The middle ground
You don’t have to choose between doing it all yourself and paying for a full build. You can build it yourself and have us check it before it goes live. We look at security, setup, speed and accessibility, and tell you what to fix.
Or you can bring us in only for the hard part, like the booking system, and keep the rest. That’s what our tech consulting is for.