AI tools are increasingly becoming part of the web development workflow. They can help developers brainstorm, troubleshoot technical problems, evaluate design decisions, and work more efficiently.
But there’s an important distinction between using AI to support your work and letting AI do your creative thinking for you.
In this lesson, we’ll explore how AI can support the process of building a WordPress website while keeping human creativity, decision-making, and judgment at the center.
Your Ideas Come First
When you’re building a website, you make decisions about its purpose, audience, personality, content, and design.
Those decisions should come from you.
AI might help you explore possibilities or solve a problem, but it shouldn’t be responsible for deciding what your website is or what makes it interesting.
For example, imagine you’re creating a website for a fictional independent bookstore.
Your creative decisions might include:
- The bookstore’s name and personality
- Its intended audience
- The visual style and overall atmosphere
- The kinds of books, events, and experiences it features
- How visitors should navigate and interact with the site
Once you’ve established those ideas, AI might help you develop sample content, explore layout alternatives, or troubleshoot something that isn’t working.
The goal is to use AI as a tool in your creative process, not as a replacement for that process.
Four Ways to Explore AI in Your WordPress Workflow
1. Generating Sample Content
Building a website requires content. You need headings, paragraphs, product descriptions, images, and other materials to experiment with how WordPress displays and organizes information.
But in this class, we’re primarily focused on learning how to build and customize websites, not evaluating your writing skills. Creating every paragraph or product description from scratch might take time away from the WordPress skills we’re trying to develop.
AI-generated sample content can be useful here. It allows you to populate a fictional website with realistic material so you can focus on designing pages, formatting blocks, building WooCommerce products, and experimenting with layouts.
Example prompt:
Write three short sample product descriptions for a fictional independent bookstore specializing in fantasy novels. The tone should be playful but not overly cute. These descriptions will be used as sample content for a WordPress class project.
Once you’ve generated the content, you should edit it to fit your website and use it to experiment with different WordPress features.
Trade-offs to Consider 🤔
- Generic content: AI-generated copy can sound polished without communicating anything distinctive. Does the content reflect your website’s personality, or could it belong to almost any website?
- Inaccurate information: AI can invent convincing details, including product features, testimonials, or business claims. Be careful not to present fictional information as fact.
- Content shapes design: The length, structure, and personality of content influence layout and visual hierarchy. What happens when you replace sample content with real content?
For this class: Review and edit any AI-generated content you use, and clearly credit it with a note such as:
Sample content generated with AI and edited for this demonstration website.
2. Exploring Design Alternatives
Sometimes the hardest part of building a website is figuring out how to organize everything.
You might know what content belongs on your homepage but struggle with how to arrange it. Should upcoming events appear first? Should products be organized into columns? Would a different layout make the information easier to understand?
AI can help you brainstorm possible solutions before you start building.
Example prompt:
I’m building a WordPress homepage for an independent bookstore. I need to feature upcoming events, staff recommendations, and new arrivals. Suggest three ways I could organize these sections using standard WordPress blocks.
Instead of asking AI to design the entire website, you’re asking it to help you explore possibilities. You might experiment with two of its suggestions, combine elements from several, or decide that none of them fit your vision.
Trade-offs to Consider 🤔
- Familiar vs. original: AI often suggests familiar design patterns. These can improve usability, but they may also limit creativity or result in predictable designs.
- Technical feasibility: AI might suggest layouts or features that aren’t practical with your particular WordPress theme or available blocks.
- Creative decision-making: AI can offer possibilities, but you still need to decide which solutions best support your audience, goals, and design vision.
3. Getting Feedback on Your Design
Once you’ve built part of your website, AI can offer another perspective on what you’ve created.
For example, you might share a screenshot of your homepage and ask AI to evaluate its visual hierarchy, spacing, contrast, or readability.
Example prompt:
Evaluate the visual hierarchy of this WordPress homepage. What draws attention first? Are there areas where spacing, alignment, or contrast could be improved? Suggest specific changes I could make using WordPress blocks.
This can be particularly helpful when you’ve been staring at the same design for hours and are having trouble seeing it with fresh eyes.
AI might identify inconsistencies you hadn’t noticed or suggest improvements worth experimenting with. But you might also disagree with its feedback, and that’s okay! Evaluating feedback is part of the design process.
Trade-offs to Consider 🤔
- Reliability: AI can make confident recommendations that aren’t necessarily good ones. Evaluate its suggestions rather than treating them as definitive answers.
- Missing context: AI may not understand your intended audience, design goals, or the reasoning behind your creative decisions.
- AI vs. real users: AI feedback isn’t the same as usability testing–> or even talking to a real person! Observing real people interacting with your website can reveal problems AI might miss.
4. Troubleshooting and Learning WordPress
WordPress has a lot of moving parts! Between themes, plugins, blocks, templates, and settings, it’s easy to encounter something unfamiliar.
AI can be a useful learning companion when you’re trying to understand a feature or troubleshoot a problem.
For example, perhaps you’ve started experimenting with Query Loops but aren’t sure how the different blocks work together.
Example prompt:
I’m using a WordPress Query Loop block to display my latest blog posts, but I don’t understand how the Post Template block controls the layout. Can you explain how these blocks work together?
Notice that this prompt asks AI to explain a concept, rather than simply provide a solution.
You can also ask follow-up questions, request examples, or have AI break down an unfamiliar technical explanation into simpler language.
Trade-offs to Consider 🤔
- Outdated or incorrect advice: AI may suggest settings that no longer exist, provide instructions for another version of WordPress, or recommend solutions that don’t work with your theme.
- Understanding vs. following directions: If AI tells you exactly which buttons to click without explaining why, you might solve the immediate problem without learning how to solve a similar one later.
- Overreliance: AI can make troubleshooting easier, but relying on it for every problem may prevent you from developing your own technical confidence and problem-solving skills.
- A narrower perspective: Relying on a single resource can limit what you discover. Exploring documentation, tutorials, forums, and conversations with other developers exposes you to different approaches and helps you understand the larger communities, both online and offline, that shape the tools and practices you’re learning.
Tip: Ask AI to explain why a solution works, not just what to do. Ask it for other highly rated resources. Test its suggestions, and consult official WordPress documentation when necessary.
A Simple AI-Assisted Workflow
Whatever you’re using AI for, the process should involve more than simply accepting its first response.
- Start with your own goal. Identify what you’re trying to accomplish and why.
- Ask a focused question. Give AI enough context to provide a useful response.
- Evaluate the output. Consider accuracy, usefulness, appropriateness, and limitations.
- Make your own decisions. Adapt, improve, or reject the suggestions.
- Apply and test in WordPress. See whether the solution actually works.
The most important part of this process isn’t the prompt or the AI-generated response. It’s what you do with the information afterward.
AI Workflows in the Real World
There’s an important difference between experimenting with AI in a classroom project and using it when you’re building a website professionally.
In our class, you might use AI to generate sample product descriptions for a fictional bookstore so you can focus on learning WooCommerce.
In freelance or professional work, things can get more complicated. What if you’re creating content for a real business? What if your client has different expectations about AI? Who is responsible for checking the accuracy of AI-generated work? And how might using AI change the creative process itself?
These aren’t questions with simple, universal answers. Designers, developers, writers, researchers, and other creative professionals are actively exploring the opportunities, limitations, and ethical questions surrounding AI.
Explore the Conversation
Here are a few resources that offer different perspectives:AI is changing how we build websites, write code, design interfaces, and create content. But what does that mean for the people doing the work? These articles offer different perspectives on the opportunities, challenges, and evolving role of human creativity and expertise.
- UX & Design: AI in UX: Work Is Faster, But Practitioners Have Mixed Feelings (Nielsen Norman Group) — A look at how AI can support design without replacing human judgment.
- Web Development: The Results of the 2026 Developer Survey Are Here! (Stack Overflow) — How developers are using AI, where it helps, and where they remain skeptical.
- Learning to Code: Getting Ready for 2026 Results (Stack Overflow) — What AI-assisted coding means for developing your own technical skills.
- Content Creation: Nielsen Norman Group’s AI articles — Questions about authorship, accountability, and the role of human creativity in AI-assisted content.
- The Future of Development: What the Fastest-Growing Tools Reveal About How Software Is Being Built (GitHub) — How new tools and technologies are reshaping development workflows.
AI and the WordPress Ecosystem
AI isn’t just something you use alongside WordPress. It’s increasingly being integrated into WordPress itself, through plugins, experimental features, and AI-assisted site-building tools.
Curious about what’s happening? Explore the WordPress AI Team, take a look at the official AI plugin, or read about WordPress.com’s AI Assistant.
As you explore, consider: Which of these features would genuinely improve your workflow? Which might make it easier to skip learning how WordPress actually works?
Your Turn: Experiment, Evaluate, Reflect
As part of Project 3, you’ll explore how AI can support your WordPress workflow.
Experiment with one or more of the approaches we’ve discussed: generating sample content, exploring design alternatives, getting feedback, or troubleshooting.
As you experiment, pay attention to more than what AI produces. Consider what works, what doesn’t, and what decisions still require your own judgment.
Remember: You’re not being evaluated on how impressive your AI output is. You’re learning to make thoughtful decisions about when, why, and how to use AI as part of your WordPress workflow.
The goal is to become a more capable, curious, and intentional web developer. AI may be one tool that helps you get there, but you’re still the one building the website.