My website was built with AI and now it's broken

You built it over a weekend with one of the AI tools. It looked brilliant. You showed your mates, stuck the link on Facebook and felt a bit smug about the money you didn’t spend on somebody like me. Then three weeks later a customer rings to ask why nobody replied to their enquiry.

You never got it.

I’m not anti-AI. I use it every day, I’ve written about whether AI can build a website for your business, and I even made a video about it (Can you just use AI?). A load of rescue jobs like this have landed on my desk lately, and they go wrong in the same places. This is what I find when I open one up, and the order I check things in.

And the thing that’s broken is still the contact form. Either it’s not wired up properly or the email provider isn’t working. Even in this magical age of AI, we still can’t get contact forms right.

Why does a website built with AI break?

AI builds the bit you can see. Picture a showroom kitchen: lovely doors, shiny taps, and no plumbing behind the cupboards. You turn the tap and nothing comes out.

It writes code that looks right on the screen you tested it on. Everything nobody looks at gets skipped or faked, which on a website means:

• where the form data goes
• the emails that are meant to come out the other end
• security
• what happens when 50 people turn up at once
• updates (nobody has thought about updates)

Then there’s ownership. The person who ‘built’ it can’t read the code, so when it breaks there’s nobody to ask. You can ask the AI, and it’ll cheerfully suggest a fix that breaks something else.

To be fair to it, the AI does build the bits underneath as well, and they’ll appear to work…but without somebody who knows what they’re doing asking the right questions, how can you ever really know?

What I actually find when I open one up

Contact forms that never reached Postmark

This one isn’t funny. The contact form looked perfect. You filled it in, pressed send and got a nice ‘Thanks, we’ll be in touch’.

The email never arrived. The site was meant to send it through Postmark (an email sending service, the bit that gets form messages into your inbox), and the owner hadn’t added the API secret, or didn’t know how to. The daft bit is the answer was sitting right there in the chat with the AI. Nothing on the site checked whether the email had gone, so the thank-you message showed every single time regardless.

The owner thought the website wasn’t getting enquiries. It was getting them and binning them. If that sounds familiar, I’ve written a whole post on why your website isn’t getting enquiries, and a broken form is the first thing I’d rule out.

POST requests nobody handled

This one’s a bit more technical, so bear with me. A POST request is how a form hands what you’ve typed over to the website. Something on the server has to catch it and decide what to do with it.

On this job, nothing came out the other end. No emails got sent at all. When nobody’s written that bit properly, the data goes nowhere or the spam bots move in, or both, which takes some doing.

Testimonials from people who don’t exist

AI loves making up testimonials and case studies. I’ve seen more than one website now where we’ve nearly put it live with AI-generated proof still on it (glowing reviews from customers nobody’s ever met). I suspect some just leave it there. Don’t be those guys.

How to check your own AI website before you pay anyone

None of this needs you to be technical. Give it half an hour with a brew.

• Fill in every form on the website from a different email address and see if it lands. Check spam too. Three forms means three tests, because one working tells you nothing about the others.
• Right-click on a page, choose View Page Source, then press Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on a Mac) and search for ‘prompt’, ‘You are’, ‘TODO’ and ‘key’. If you find instructions you remember typing into the AI, that’s the prompt chain. A long random string next to the word ‘key’ wants changing today.
• Your speed is worth a look in PageSpeed Insights, on mobile. Don’t panic if it’s nowhere near 100 (PageSpeed Insights explained covers why you don’t need it). You’re looking for anything painfully slow.
• Type site:yourdomain.co.uk into Google. If nothing comes back, Google can’t see your website at all.
• Find out who has the login, where it’s hosted and whether there’s a backup. If the answer to all of it is ’the AI tool’, write that down.

If you’d rather something did a first pass for you, the free website check takes about 30 seconds.

Can you fix an AI-generated website, or should you start again?

Fix it when the site’s small, the structure underneath is sound and the problems are specific, like a form that doesn’t send or a prompt chain left in the source. Somebody who can read the code sorts that in 20 minutes and you carry on.

Start again when nobody can explain how it works, or every fix breaks something else, or it’s slow, or it’s the page your Google Ads budget lands on. It’s a car where the garage finds another problem every time they lift the bonnet. At some point you stop paying them to lift the bonnet.

Wolf Laundry wasn’t built with AI, so don’t read it as an AI story. It’s what a broken website costs. They were paying £3,000 a month on Google Ads and getting zero leads, because the site took ten seconds to load. We rebuilt it and got that down to about one second. Within weeks of launch it was bringing in 30–60 leads a month, and now it brings in 150–200. The whole thing’s in the Wolf Laundry case study.

Rucklidge Law is a smaller version of the same lesson: load time cut from six seconds to two, and the site converts up to 35% better at peak.

What it costs to fix (and what it costs to leave it)

Our prices are on the website. Properly made websites start from £5,000, and most projects land between £8,000 and £12,000. We don’t do fix-only jobs. You’re welcome to email us, though, and we’ll tell you whether your site needs binning or can be recovered. If it needs rebuilding, you get a fixed price after one call.

Leaving it costs you too. Every enquiry that disappears into a broken form is a customer who thinks you ignored them and rang the other lot instead. I can’t put a number on yours, but you know roughly what a customer’s worth to you.

If the AI build was the cheap option in the first place, I’ve written about what a cheap website really costs. Buy cheap, buy twice applies to robots as well.

So should you have used AI in the first place?

Using AI to get going is fine. I’d do it. The trouble starts when nobody checks the bits you can’t see, and on a website those are the bits that bring the money in.

If you want somebody to look at yours, this page tells you what we cost and how to book a call.

And check your contact form works. Just send yourself a test email.