Build your website for AI, not for a CMS from 2010

If you commission a new business website today, nine times out of ten you get the same proposal: WordPress, a theme, a handful of plugins, an admin login where you can type your own pages. That is a perfectly good answer to the question people were asking ten or fifteen years ago. The question has changed since then.

I have been building software for years, and I use AI tools every day in that work. The thing that has struck me most has nothing to do with websites as such, but it applies to them: AI is good at the things developers work with, and much less good at the things admin screens work with. That difference now decides how much a website will cost you over the next few years, in time and in money.

What a classic CMS was built for

A content system like WordPress is designed around a human being. A person logs in, clicks new page, types into an editor, drags a block, hits publish. Everything around that, the database, the theme, the plugins, the settings screens, exists to make that one action possible for someone who does not write code.

That is a decent solution in itself. The problem is that it puts the content of your site inside a database, behind a login, in a structure that only that one system understands. AI can certainly work with it, through the interface or through an integration, but it is always a detour. The tooling has to get through a shell before it reaches your text.

Give the same AI plain files and the picture flips. Your website becomes a folder of text files, a set of reusable components and a design system that fixes how a heading, a button and a pricing card look. AI is surprisingly creative with that. You ask for a new services page in the style of the existing pages, and it appears, using your components, in your layout, without anyone having to wrestle a theme into shape.

Templates, by the way, are not the problem here. I often hear that custom work is better by definition, and that is nonsense. A template is simply an agreement about how things look, and it is exactly that agreement which makes it easy for AI to add new pages and articles that do not look out of place.

What the classic route costs

An honest price picture belongs here, because this is not only about technology. The figures below are typical market numbers rather than a law of nature, but you will recognise them if you have ever asked for a quote.

Having an agency build a WordPress site usually costs between 3,000 and 8,000 euro. After that you pay for hosting and maintenance, somewhere between 50 and 150 euro per month, because there is a system running that has to be kept up to date. Licences for your theme and plugins typically run from 100 to 300 euro per year. Want something changed later, and that happens at an hourly rate of roughly 75 to 125 euro. And every two to three years a rebuild shows up on the agenda, because the theme is no longer supported or the pile of plugins has seized up.

Add that up over five years. The number you land on rarely matches what the site actually does for your business, which is to explain who you are and get people to make contact.

How we do it

This site, web2000.nl, is built the way I build them for clients. It is a static site, made with Astro. The content sits in git as plain files, so everything that was ever changed can be traced back. The site is hosted on Cloudflare and costs nothing there. No database is running and no plugin stack, so there is nothing to patch when the next plugin vulnerability turns up.

Building a site like that starts at 2,500 euro.

The point is not that static is modern. The point is that the site then consists of things AI can read and write directly, with no layer in between that only ever existed to help a human click.

So who keeps it up to date

That depends on you, and it is the conversation I would rather have before we start.

If you are comfortable with it, I set up your AI tooling so you can adjust a page or have a new article written with a prompt, inside your own design system, so the result fits the rest of the site. You do not need to read code for that. You do need to want to understand what you are doing, and that is no different with a WordPress admin screen.

If you update your site twice a year, or you simply have no appetite for this kind of thing, we do it. That is not a second-rate option. It is often just the cheapest way to get it done properly, because it costs me less time than it costs you.

A website AI can read easily is also a website you can still have someone else change three years from now.

What this does not fix

I want to be honest about the limits. A technically tidy site does not sell anything by itself. If you do not know what you offer and who it is for, you end up with a fast, well-structured page that nobody understands. AI does not write good copy about a business that has not worked out its own story yet.

And there are situations where a classic CMS makes plain sense. If you have five editors publishing daily and an editorial process with approvals, an admin environment is precisely what you need. Most of the businesses I talk to do not have that. They have a ten page site, update it a few times a year, and pay monthly in the meantime to maintain machinery they never use.

If you have a quote for a new site sitting on your desk right now, it is worth putting one question next to it: what will I have paid for this in total after five years, and what do I get back for that which I would not have otherwise. If you cannot work that out, feel free to send it over. I am happy to take a look with you.