Are you thinking about building a website? I had that same itch. I wanted to run an AI business, and I ended up building and running a website business using nothing but vibe coding. Back when I looked into it, outsourcing the build would have cost more than I was willing to spend. So instead of handing my money to someone else, I decided I would just build it myself with vibe coding. After building and running a few sites of my own, I realized something crucial. Here is the bottom line. You should never use vibe coding to build a website you plan to run long term. WordPress just costs less and takes less work to keep running. Today I want to talk about what I realized while building web pages.
The Sweet Spot For Vibe Coding
Before we get into that let me explain where vibe coding actually shines and where it falls short. I honestly used to wonder if vibe coding was even real. But once I actually tried it, I realized you can build genuinely decent stuff this way now. If you simply ask ChatGPT or Claude to make a homepage with a certain feel it spits out a surprisingly good result in less than five minutes. You obviously need a few rounds of back and forth before it looks finished, but I was shocked by how good the design already looked. It even handles revisions really well. That is why vibe coding is more than enough for things like short term event pages, promotional announcements, and specific landing pages. When your budget and time are tight, it makes sense to trade a bit of quality for speed. Build the promo page cheaply with vibe coding, then put your real money into advertising or your main site.
The Hidden Cost Of Your Time
You might be tempted to think vibe coding is the answer to everything, but that story changes entirely once we are talking about a company homepage. A business site does not just sit there after it is built. You have to post announcements, update content, and add application forms to receive inquiries. There is always something demanding your attention. Building the homepage is not the end. It is really just the beginning. People usually only think about the initial production cost, but you also have to pay for the domain and the hosting, both of which renew every single year. Running these sites myself taught me three specific things you need to watch for. Since some of you might be building a site for the first time, I will walk you through them step by step.
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| Time You Never Get Back |
The first huge factor is time. Vibe coding will get you a result in a surprisingly short amount of time, but that is nowhere near the end of the process. Before your site can even appear on major search engines like Google, you have to select a hosting service, pay for it, create a domain, and manually connect everything. If you are used to this setup it goes quickly, but beginners will have to ask ChatGPT how to do it or figure it out on their own. On top of that, you have to create accounts with services like Github, Vercel, and Replit, then get them all talking to each other. You cannot delegate this to AI, so you have to do it all yourself. If a CEO or a manager ends up doing all this work, it will eat up an absurd amount of time. When you put a price on that time, it is never actually free.
If you still believe the influencers telling you that you can launch a fully functional business with just a few simple prompts you should read about my own harsh reality check in I Tried Vibe Coding And YouTube Lied To Me. It exposes what those viral tutorials conveniently leave out.
The Inevitable Wall Of Tangled Code
You also need to think about the money you bleed every time you make a revision. The second major factor is maintenance, and it is genuinely agonizing. Websites built with vibe coding do not come with a basic admin page. That literally means you have to write code every single time you want to update information or fix a typo. You could technically build your own admin page, but that just increases your development time and gives you even more things to maintain, so it is never as easy as it sounds. Every time you want to update one tiny thing, you have to open your AI, check the code, make the fix, test it, push it to Github, and deploy it. You have to repeat this entire sequence over and over. You burn through tokens the whole time too, so you are always paying for it in small amounts. I repeated this cycle so many times that I deeply regretted not just paying an agency from the start to save my time and avoid the massive headache. I would bet plenty of people you know have thought the same thing.
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| Untangling This Costs More Than Building It |
The third problem is that there is a hard ceiling on how far you can scale this. As you repeat this process of building and improving your homepage with vibe coding, you will eventually hit a brick wall. You might try to add a new feature or run an update only to find that the code itself has become a tangled mess. This will either break the site outright or force you to rebuild everything from scratch. The real tragedy is that if you try to hire a professional agency at that point, it will cost you a lot more than it would have in the beginning. All those months you spent tinkering with your vibe coded homepage will end up being nothing more than an expensive lesson while your bills keep climbing. You should never assume that vibe coding a homepage is cheap across the board. You have to factor in how much of your own time and effort goes into it. These hidden costs are invisible at first but they add up fast. If you are not a developer, it will take a very long time just to get used to how all of this works.
If you want to understand the technical reasons why these quickly generated apps inevitably collapse under their own weight I broke down the structural problem in detail in Why Vibe Coding Is Built To Fail. Reading it will save you months of agonizing trial and error.
Build A Foundation That Lasts
That is why I strongly recommend building with WordPress if you plan to keep the site running long term. I ended up migrating one of my own sites over after going through exactly the maintenance nightmare I described above, and the very first thing I noticed was how much time I got back. Above all else, WordPress provides an admin page by default. That means you can easily handle posting announcements, writing blog posts, and making simple page edits in house. You can do all of this without touching a single line of code. The painful maintenance costs I mentioned earlier drop to essentially zero. If your website grows and you need things like user logins, member registrations, and payment gateways, you do not need to tear down the existing site. It is really easy to add and update features one by one. WordPress gives you a structure that scales and adapts as your business grows and changes over time. Imagine trying to do all of that with vibe coding. It might require an astronomical amount of time and effort when that moment arrives.
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| The Answer Was There All Along |
There is another edge WordPress has when it comes to search traffic. You can do a fair amount of SEO work on a vibe coded site, but it is incredibly difficult to judge if you are actually doing it right. WordPress is just far better in this area. These days AI like ChatGPT actually reads website content and recommends it to users. This is the concept of GEO, and your odds of getting recommended go way up only if you have a well structured website like WordPress. This matches what I have seen every time I compared my own vibe coded pages against a WordPress site side by side in Google Search Console. WordPress has had this SEO reputation for years for a reason, and countless people have already been building their blogs and homepages on it just to lock in that advantage. So please do not skimp on the initial money. You have to think of the initial production cost not as money that just vanishes, but as a necessary investment to build a solid foundation you will use for years.
Human Strategy Over Artificial Shells
There is one lesson from all of this, beyond the money and the tech, that I keep coming back to. You should never pour too much of your energy into just cranking things out with AI. The AI models coming out these days are evolving at a terrifying pace, and they genuinely code much better than humans do. But the real lesson I learned here is that being able to build something well is an entirely different problem from knowing what you actually need to build. That is why planning is so critical. AI can generate a planning document for you. But I truly feel it can never surpass raw human judgment. Instead of spending all your energy polishing a shiny shell that AI built, invest that energy into your own strategic thinking. You should delegate the heavy technical lifting to AI and use your time and energy wisely. I spent two years building sites with AI, running businesses, and selling ebooks. When I did not get this, the time I wasted just turned into bitter regret. I really hope you can put your time to better use than I did.
A beautiful website built in five minutes might look like a shortcut but true business leverage belongs to those who build foundations meant to survive the next decade.
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