What differences has AI really made to WordPress development?

AI is certainly powerful for WordPress development, but it’s not a magic bullet for building a successful WordPress site.

The phrase “Can’t you just do it with AI?” is something that’s being bandied about a lot more regularly now in the world of freelance WordPress development.

There is a perception that we can simply tell AI what we want to do with our website, and it will magically do it all in a jiffy.

The problem is that, in reality, AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude can certainly do things on your website, but they will most definitely do them wrong.

AI is not magic.

I’ve been working as a WordPress freelancer for over 15 years, and I have to admit that recent developments in AI tools have certainly improved my workflow and enabled me to deliver more complex functionality more quickly than I could have previously.

However, there is a caveat: I know exactly what I’m talking about. Therefore, when I prompt AI, I very carefully prompt it to do all the things that I know it would do wrong and avoid them.

One of the main issues with developing WordPress sites using PHP is that there are literally a hundred different ways to achieve the same thing.

In reality, most of the different ways that you can achieve the same result are usually correct, it’s often down to developer preference, but when it comes to code, you want consistency across your website, you don’t want one thing done one way on one page and another thing done differently on something else, this simply results in what I would call a patchwork website, where it looks like it’s been developed by 25 different people, all of whom have had slightly different opinions on how things should be done.

AI is certainly a powerful tool in the right hands. It’s a lot like baking. You can read the instructions about how to bake the perfect French Macaron, but if you’ve never done it before, the chances are it’s going to come out like a bit of a dog’s dinner.

Experience counts.

WordPress developers generally come in two flavours: those who code everything bespoke and those who use tools like Elementor or Divi to colour in a website for a client.

Developers who use page builders are probably more likely to integrate an MCP into your WordPress site because they don’t really know what they’re doing and hope that AI can make them look like a better developer.

The danger with this is, as I’ve mentioned above, you end up with code soup and a website that the developer doesn’t really understand fully and doesn’t know how it works.

The second type of developer builds WordPress sites completely bespoke, so you only get what you need. This type of developer, of which I am one, also uses AI, but I use AI differently.

Rather than relying on AI to generate code that works, I use AI to save time.

In the old days, everything was typed by hand, this took ages, and one wrong character would take the site down, typing out code takes time, even if you are a pretty fast typer, because there’s lots of syntax, lots of semicolons, and lots of different things that have to be typed and spelled correctly, spell check isn’t really much of a help.

Nowadays, I use AI to write code for me, but I’ve explicitly told AI exactly how I want it to write this code and exactly what I want the code to do, there’s a significant difference here in prompting an AI tool to write you a specific piece of code that you understand, and asking AI to write you a piece of code to achieve something that you don’t understand.

Passing on the savings.

As a freelancer who specialises in WordPress, I charge £60 an hour, which I’ve always considered to be a very affordable rate for my level of experience and the amount of work I can physically deliver in an hour.

One thing that AI has not changed is my hourly rate. I’m not going to reduce it simply because I use AI; you’re still paying for my experience, not my ability to type quickly.

Is everyone now a developer?

AI has, in theory, made this possible. It’s perfectly feasible for someone who doesn’t know how to code to build a website using AI, though it won’t necessarily be a WordPress website. This then means you’ve got to constantly use AI to edit the website, which, believe me, takes five times as long as just editing a WordPress website.

It’s also made it possible for everyone to be a bad developer – sure, you can connect your WordPress site to Claude via an MCP and ask it to do things on your website, but it will do them incredibly badly.

One recent example of this was a client who hosted their website on SiteGround and noticed that SiteGround had installed its own AI plugin on the site.

The client took this as an opportunity to get things done quickly and more cheaply than paying the developer to do the work. They happily set about getting it to write loads of new content for the website, with the understanding that what they were doing would improve the site.

What they actually did was destroy it. The AI added loads of content to the website using hundreds of lines of inline CSS and HTML within the WordPress text editor, not only does this negate the point of having a content management system, it also makes the pages a complete mess

Needless to say, the 4 hours that my client spent destroying their site took a good few hours to rectify; it basically took longer to fix it than it would have taken me to do in the first place.

Small things have big impacts on websites.

If you do something wrong on your website, it can quietly sit there looking great whilst destroying your search engine optimisation and rankings

A WordPress website is a piece of software, and software is incredibly easy to hide bugs that you don’t realise were damaging your website until you notice your rankings have dropped off a cliff three months later.

At this point, the damage has been done, and it can take six months to unpick the damage and get your site performing as well as it used to.

AI focuses on the task you ask it to perform, not the broader picture of your business objectives, marketing plans, existing keywords, ranking pages, and so on. It just goes about the task you asked it to do and does whatever it thinks is right, without sense-checking it against anything else.

Lack of context.

As I’ve mentioned above, AI operates in a vacuum. It doesn’t know what you did yesterday. It doesn’t know what your business plan is from six months ago, and it doesn’t have a full picture of your entire website when you ask it to “make this page better.”

The result of this, again, ends up with a patchwork site that looks like it’s some sort of Frankenstein that’s been cobbled together – this is bad for business, bad for your brand, and definitely bad for search engine optimisation.

In reality, what differences has AI made to managing your WordPress website?

AI has definitely sped up the coding process, but this can only be successful if the person prompting the AI knows what they are talking about.

The main issue with AI is that it tends to work in isolation. It will do what you ask. It won’t ask you questions, and it certainly won’t have the whole-site understanding that a developer has.

if you’re thinking about using AI on your website, get in touch. I’m 100% pro AI when it comes to development, SEO, and content, but only when it’s done properly. I’ve built tools that help people manage their WordPress websites and make better sense of their SEO, and I’d be happy to share with you how we could use these to improve your website.