I decided to start exploring WordPress.com with its newer feature, AI website builder.
Like other AI site builders, on WordPress.com, you start with the prompt where you describe your site topic and format. It will ask you a few follow-up questions (title and tagline), which, depending on how detailed your initial prompt was, you can ask it to generate for you. I ended up providing my own:
Then, it will take you to the next step, where you can watch your site being born while refining its look and feel through more prompts.
Adjusting the design through AI prompts
I wanted the new site to look like my main site and align with my personal branding, so I gave it my URL and asked to create a matching style.
Turns out, it cannot follow URLs and fetch pages, so it provided me with other options:
- Create a screenshot of my site and send it to the chat
- Send me the color palette.
On Firefox, I couldn’t easily figure out how to send attachments, so I just gave it my site’s color palette, and it quickly generated the look and feel that matched it.
Using the preview, you can also manually remove, duplicate, or rearrange:
You can also edit any text inside any block:
From there, I asked a few follow-up questions to make sure everything was going to work smoothly when I exited the AI mode:
Noticing a “Subscribe” option on my home page, I asked:
How will my newsletter work? Will I need to integrate it with a third-party service, or will you manage it for me?
WP AI helpfully explained:
WordPress.com handles everything for you natively — no third-party email service needed!
When someone subscribes via the Subscribe block on your site, they’re added to your subscriber list automatically. Then, every time you publish a new post on Build a WordPress site with AI, an email is sent to your subscribers automatically with the post content.
You can manage your subscribers at People → Subscribers, and tweak how the emails look (featured image, author info, full text vs. excerpt, etc.) at Settings → Newsletters.
This is nice!
What kind of prompts can I use?
Any type of prompts you can imagine. Change fonts, adjust the design, ask to edit text, generate better headlines, etc.
I asked for all kinds of help, just for the fun of it, e.g.
Can you add an emoji here pointing to the social media icons below?
And here you go:
Publishing your site
This is where it got a bit confusing because I couldn’t preview my site, nor did I see an obvious way to publish it to the web.
I asked my AI assistant why the preview isn’t working, and it gave me a bunch of references to browser cookies. It may very well have been the reason, but I didn’t want to read or try to fix it.
I asked it to publish my site, but it looks like it needs to happen manually:
Head to Settings → Reading and under Site Visibility, select Public, then click Save Changes.
I am very comfortable with WP dashboard, but I can see that this part might be a bit confusing for new users.
Overall, it was a cool experiment. I didn’t love the theme that much, so the next steps are going to be to try, and adjust it more with prompts.
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