Remember the energy at WordCamp Asia 2025 in Manila, Philippines? It was a fantastic event! I had a chat there with an agency owner who shared a real challenge they’re facing: competitors quoting incredibly low prices for websites, sometimes as little as 1K Rupee (that’s less than $12 USD!). It makes you scratch your head and wonder how anyone sustains a business at those rates. Building a quality website requires significant effort, expertise, and creative input. When market prices drop so low, turning a decent profit becomes incredibly difficult. Agencies are under immense pressure to find ways to cut costs and boost efficiency without compromising the quality of their work. It’s a tricky tightrope walk in today’s market.
AI to the Rescue
But what if there’s a smarter way to handle this intense price competition? What if agencies could drastically reduce the time spent on the initial, more routine parts of a project? That would free up their talented teams for the truly impactful, higher-value tasks. This is where Artificial Intelligence steps in. Think of AI not as a replacement for human skill, but as a powerful assistant, a co-pilot working alongside your team. AI tools are advancing rapidly, offering capabilities that streamline the website creation process. They can automate repetitive tasks, speed up the initial build phase, and help agencies complete projects more quickly and profitably. And it’s not just agencies who benefit! Imagine the time and effort saved for a website owner who’s just starting out, a beginner navigating the world of WordPress, or anyone who simply needs a professional website quickly without getting bogged down in complex steps.
Meet the AI Helpers
Several promising AI tools are already making a difference in the WordPress ecosystem, helping users tackle the initial build phase with much greater speed.
A Closer Look at Extendify
One powerful example I’ve seen is Extendify. This tool really showcases how AI can jumpstart your projects. Extendify uses AI to generate not just the initial structure and layouts of a website, but it goes further. Based on the information you provide about the client and their needs, its AI can also draft initial content for pages and even generate relevant images. This gets a website project to an 80% ready state in just minutes, rather than requiring hours or days of manual setup.
Think about building a website for a local cafe, for instance. With Extendify, you could potentially generate the entire site, including key pages like the menu complete with food and drink listings and prices, a page for promotions or daily specials, an ‘About Us’ page telling their story, and a contact page with location details. The AI provides a solid, intelligent starting point for all of these. Plus, they’ve recently added an AI Page Creation feature. This means if you need to add a new page later on, you just enter a prompt describing that page, and the AI will generate all the content and create a layout that matches the rest of the website’s design. Imagine skipping much of the initial content population and image creation because the AI has already provided a solid foundation. This dramatically cuts down the time needed for the foundational setup and adding new sections, allowing your team to dive straight into customization, refinement, and unique features. For agencies, this means significantly faster project kick-offs, quicker initial prototypes for client review, and streamlined content additions. For individual users, it means getting a professional-looking site or adding new content much, much faster than doing it all manually.
Extendify’s pricing structure is tailored for hosting providers, starting at $999/month for 5000 websites. Notably, it’s included free with WP Squared, an innovative control panel for modern Managed WordPress Hosting.
Agencies and website owners typically find Extendify bundled with supported hosting providers, especially those powered by WP Squared, making it easily accessible.
Other Tools
Beyond Extendify, other tools like ZipWP also focus on accelerating this initial build phase, offering different approaches to quickly generate website foundations. And WordPress.com has entered this space with its new AI Website Builder. While this tool might primarily target individuals looking to build their own sites quickly, the underlying technology is quite interesting. I think agencies can explore its capabilities to understand the evolving AI landscape within WordPress and perhaps even consider if it fits into their workflow for certain types of projects, like very small sites with limited budgets. The key takeaway is that a range of AI tools are emerging, each helping users manage their website creation more efficiently.
More Ways AI Can Lend a Hand
AI’s utility for WordPress users extends well beyond just generating the initial site structure, content, and images. Consider AI for content assistance. Need placeholder text or a starting point for a service page or blog post? AI can provide a solid draft that a human writer can then refine and perfect. AI can also help with visuals, suggesting image ideas or assisting with basic graphic tasks. Developers can use AI for generating code snippets or even helping to debug issues more quickly. AI for SEO can offer suggestions for keywords, meta descriptions, and content structure to help sites perform better in search results. And for creating more dynamic user experiences, AI can assist with personalization, helping tailor website content and layout for individual visitors.
Working Together
It’s really important to see these AI tools as partners, not replacements, for the valuable skills of human designers, developers, and strategists. AI can handle the more repetitive, time-consuming tasks – the heavy lifting involved in getting a basic site structure and initial content in place. This frees up your team to focus on what they do best: deeply understanding the client’s business, creating unique and compelling designs that truly represent their brand, developing custom functionalities, and building strong, lasting relationships with clients. For individual users, it means they can focus on their business or passion, rather than getting stuck on technical website building details. Embracing AI is about enhancing human capabilities, enabling agencies to remain competitive, improve their profitability, and deliver outstanding results. It also empowers individual users to build and manage their online presence more effectively in a market that values both speed and quality.
So, what’s your experience? Are you currently using AI tools in your WordPress workflow? Which ones have you found most effective? Share your thoughts in the comments below! The conversation about AI in WordPress is just getting started, and by exploring these powerful tools, I believe we can collectively navigate the challenges of the current market and build a more successful future for all WordPress users.
