Should I use Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, or AI to build my website?

None of the first three. And "AI" the way most people use it is wrong too.

Here's what usually happens. Someone wants a site for their bakery, their studio, their contracting business. They open Wix, pick a template 40,000 other businesses already use, drag boxes around for a weekend, and end up paying $30 a month forever for a site that looks like a template. Or they go the WordPress route because someone said it's free, then pay for hosting, a theme, a forms plugin, a security plugin, a backup plugin, and spend a Saturday a month clicking "update" and hoping nothing breaks. Or they hear AI builds websites now, open a chat window, type "make me a bakery website", and get a page of code they don't know what to do with.

The second person is closer. They just skipped the part that matters.

The part everyone skips

AI can build a genuinely great website in one go now. Not a mockup. A real, fast, modern site with motion and interactive bits, live on your own domain. I recently built a full bilingual site, CMS included, for a repair business in Mazatlán in one evening, and a site for a painter where the whole page paints itself in your browser, overnight.

The reason it works for me and not for the person in the chat window isn't a secret prompt. It's the keys.

An AI agent that can't create a GitHub repository, can't deploy to Cloudflare, can't add a DNS record and can't set up your analytics is a very smart person with their hands tied. It writes code, then hands it back to you and asks you to do the hard part. You get stuck, it gets blamed.

Give the same agent the keys to those accounts and it does the whole thing itself: builds the site, deploys it, connects the domain, sets up the contact form and the email records, wires up analytics and Search Console, and tells you when it's live.

So that's what this guide is. Most of the setup is getting keys into one place the agent can read. The rest is a handful of prompts.

The rule: the agent does everything

You click only when a human genuinely has to:

• Paying for something (your domain, Claude, and Cloudflare's $5 plan if you end up needing it).
• Accepting terms a company insists a person accepts (Google, Stripe).
• Proving it's you (signing in when a browser window pops up, clicking Authorize).

What you end up with

• A custom site, designed for you, not a template.
• Hosted on Cloudflare for $0 a month for most small sites. $5 a month if you want the extras (emails to customers, a CMS). Contact forms included either way.
• Code in your own GitHub account. You own it. Nobody can hold it hostage.
• Analytics and Google Search Console set up properly on day one.
• Changes done by asking, in plain English. Or a proper CMS if you really want one.

How this guide works

It's opinionated. One tool per job. I'm not going to give you a comparison table of twelve hosting providers. If you do it a different way, fine, but you're on your own.

1. Setup (steps 1 to 5). Domain, accounts, the key vault, one key, the agent. Do these once. Don't skip any of it.
2. Pick a path.
   • Path A: just the site. Most people. One prompt.
   • Path B: the site plus a CMS. If other people need to edit pages without AI.
   • Path C: the site plus a store. If you're selling things.
3. Add-ons. Forms and email, analytics, going live on your domain.

Next: what you're going to use and what it costs.