Why the £400 website costs more than the £4,000 one

A cheap AI-built website usually costs a business more over two years than a professionally designed one, because of rebuild costs, lost search visibility, and the very real risk that you don't own your own domain, hosting or content.

There's a new offer doing the rounds. Someone spent a weekend learning that you can build a website by describing it to an AI tool, and now they're selling that to local businesses for a few hundred pounds. The demo looks convincing. The price is hard to argue with.

We use AI every day at Lowe Design. Every site we build passes through AI tooling at some stage — it writes code faster than any human can type. So this isn't a post about AI being bad for websites. It's about what happens when AI is asked to supply the judgement instead of the labour.

That's the whole difference. A designer who knows what good looks like, using AI to get there faster, produces something very different from someone who doesn't know what good looks like, hoping the machine does.

The person building it can't tell good output from bad

This is the root of it. Everything else follows.

Someone who hasn't spent years designing interfaces doesn't know that navigation belongs in a predictable place, that a button needs a visible pressed state, or that a form error has to say what went wrong and how to fix it. They don't know what a spacing scale is, so nothing lines up. They don't know what type hierarchy is, so everything shouts at the same volume.

They can't read the code, so they can't tell whether they've been handed something solid or something held together with tape. When it breaks, the only move available is to paste the error back into the chat and hope.

And they can't spot the invisible things that actually cost you money:

• No analytics, so you never find out what's working
• No schema markup, so Google and AI tools can't understand what your business is or where it is
• Meta titles left as defaults, or missing entirely
• No sitemap, no redirects from your old URLs, so years of accumulated ranking gets thrown away on launch day
• Images uploaded straight off a phone at 4MB each, making the site crawl on mobile
• No accessibility: poor contrast, no focus states, no alt text, no keyboard navigation

That last one isn't a design nicety. Under the Equality Act, a website that a disabled customer can't use is your problem as the business owner, not the builder's.

There was no strategy, because there was no process

Ask what a website is for and most owners will say something specific: fill the quiet months, take bookings direct instead of through a platform, get the phone ringing.

A weekend build starts with none of that. Nobody ran a discovery session. Nobody asked who the customer is, what they're worried about, or what would make them pick up the phone. The pages exist because the AI suggested a set of pages. The copy is filler, or it's AI-written and reads like every other AI-written page on the internet — same rhythm, same three sentence shapes, no voice.

There's no brand either. A font that came as default, a colour picked in the moment, a logo generated in half a minute. Nothing that works on a van, a sign, a menu or a business card. So you've paid for a website and still don't have an identity.

Then there's the scrolling trend

The other version of this is the site that looks impressive and works badly.

AI video and image tools have made full-screen, motion-heavy, scroll-driven websites cheap to produce. Six panels of animation before you reach a phone number. Text that fades in as you scroll. A hero video of a building that doesn't quite exist.

Scrolling is the new clicking. Every extra scroll is another opportunity for someone to leave. Most business websites need to deliver the point immediately, not reveal it gradually.

There are genuine uses for this. Product launches, single-message landing pages, brand storytelling — done well, scroll-driven design is superb, and we build it. But it takes restraint, and knowing when not to. Without that you get:

• Heavy animation libraries that wreck performance on mobile, where most of your traffic is
• Content that only appears on scroll, which means search engines and AI tools may never see it
• No reduced-motion handling, so anyone sensitive to movement can't use the site
• AI-generated imagery that quietly destroys trust — a fake photo of your premises is worse than no photo at all
• A look so tied to right now that it'll be embarrassing in eighteen months

What happens after the invoice is paid

This is where the money actually goes.

You might not own your own website. This is the one to check today. Domain registered on the builder's personal account. Hosting on their free tier. CMS sitting under their Google login. If the relationship ends badly, or just quietly, the business has an asset it can't access, move, or edit.

There's no support. No retainer, no agreement, nobody to call at nine in the morning when the booking form stops sending. And nobody notices a broken contact form for months, because there's no monitoring — the enquiries just stop and you assume it's a quiet season.

There's no handover. No documentation, no logins written down, no explanation of how to change a price or add a page.

Nothing gets maintained. Dependencies go out of date. Integrations break silently. A site left alone for two years is a security problem as well as a stale one.

Forms collect personal data with no thought given to it. Names, emails and phone numbers gathered with no privacy policy, no consent mechanism, and no clear answer about where any of it is stored. That's a UK GDPR issue with your name on it.

And people move on. It was a side hustle. A year later they've taken a job and stopped replying, and you're holding a website nobody can touch.

The dependency isn't on AI staying online — a deployed website doesn't stop working because a chatbot is down. The dependency is on the person you paid. When the site needs to change and neither of you can change it, that's when the real cost arrives: a full rebuild inside two years, plus whatever the lost rankings and missed enquiries were worth in the meantime.

How to check your own website

If you've already had a site built cheaply, this isn't a reason to panic. It's a list of things to go and verify:

1. Is the domain in your name? Log in to the registrar yourself. If you can't, that's the first problem to solve.
2. Do you have the hosting and CMS logins? In your own hands, not promised on request.
3. Does the contact form actually deliver? Send yourself a test today.
4. Run it through PageSpeed Insights. Anything under 50 on mobile is costing you visitors.
5. Search your business name plus your town. If you're not on page one, check whether the site is even indexed.
6. Open it on a three-year-old Android phone. Not your iPhone.
7. Ask ChatGPT for businesses like yours in your area. If you're not mentioned, nothing on your site is machine-readable.
8. Check there's a privacy policy if any form collects personal details.

Why Lowe Design is different

Ten years in business, working from Coleraine with clients across the Causeway Coast and beyond. Johnny Lowe is a qualified UX and product designer with a degree in Interactive Multimedia Design and a decade of delivering digital work for brands including Adobe, Jack Daniel's, Maker's Mark and Whiskas, alongside local businesses like Portrush Surf School, New Row Dental and The Sandel Centre.

What that buys you:

• Discovery before design. We establish what the site has to achieve before anyone opens a design tool.
• A brand, not just a website. Identity that works across every place your business appears.
• Design decisions with reasons behind them. Every layout choice can be explained.
• Built to be found. SEO and AEO handled properly, so both Google and AI tools understand who you are.
• You own everything. Domain, hosting, CMS, content, code. In your name from day one.
• Support that continues. A monthly retainer covering updates, SEO and AEO improvements, or an hourly rate when you just need something fixed.

Frequently asked questions

Are AI-built websites always bad? No. AI is a genuinely excellent tool for building websites quickly, and we use it daily. The problem is AI used as a replacement for design and development expertise rather than as a way of applying it faster.

What's included in a monthly retainer? Site updates, SEO improvements and AEO work — keeping your content current and your business visible to both search engines and AI tools. If you'd rather not commit monthly, ad-hoc fixes are charged at an hourly rate instead.

Can you fix a website someone else built? Yes. We audit existing sites, sort out ownership and hosting, and either repair or rebuild depending on what's underneath. Often the fastest win is fixing what's already there.

How do I find out if I own my website? Log in to the domain registrar and the hosting account yourself. If you don't have those credentials, you don't currently control your website — and that's the first thing to put right.

Thinking about a website that'll still be working in five years? Get in touch: johnny@lowedesign.io