AI can hand you a full website in minutes. That's the good news. The bad news is that "it looks finished" and "it actually works" are not the same thing — and the gap between them is exactly where AI tools tend to cut corners.
Before you share the link with a single customer, run through this checklist. It takes about five minutes.
1. Open it on your phone
Most AI-generated sites look great on the wide desktop screen they were designed on. Then you open it on a phone and the menu is broken, text overlaps, or a button is unreachable.
Do this: Pull up your site on your actual phone, not just a "mobile preview" in a browser. Try every page, every button, every form.
2. Click every link
AI tools sometimes generate placeholder links — "#" or a page that doesn't exist yet — especially for things like "Contact," "Privacy Policy," or footer links.
Do this: Click literally every link on every page. If something is a placeholder, either build that page or remove the link. A dead link on a business site reads as "this company doesn't sweat the details."
3. Check how fast it loads
AI-generated sites often come loaded with big, uncompressed images or unnecessary code the tool added "just in case." A slow site loses visitors before they see anything.
Do this: Use a free tool like PageSpeed Insights — paste in your URL and see the score. If it flags huge images, that's usually the fix: compress them or ask your AI tool to do it.
4. Look for accessibility basics
Does every image have alt text? Can you navigate the site using only your keyboard (tab key)? Is the text contrast readable — light gray text on a white background looks trendy but is hard for a lot of people to read.
Do this: Try tabbing through your homepage without touching the mouse. If you get stuck or lost, a visitor using a screen reader will too.
5. Read every word of the copy
AI writes confidently — even when it's wrong. It might invent a phone number format, misstate your hours, describe a service you don't actually offer, or just sound generic (more on that below).
Do this: Read the entire site out loud, line by line, as if you're a customer seeing it for the first time. Anything that sounds "off" or made-up, fix it or cut it.
The pattern here
None of these are hard to catch — they just require someone to actually look. AI is fast at generating; it's not naturally careful about checking its own work. That job is still yours.
Five minutes of checking now saves you an embarrassing "our website says we're open 24/7 and we're not" conversation later.
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