You built a website with AI and it looks reasonable. The next question is how to make it actually work.
This is where people stall, because tutorials generally end at generating pages. Here is a complete list from “the pages exist” to “the site is running”.
Six things to check before it goes live
None require technical background, together they take under an hour, and missing any one produces continuing loss.
1. Is the content really in the HTML.
Use view page source — not inspect element — and search for text you can see on the page. If it is not there, the content is being painted in by script and neither search engines nor AI can read it.
2. Do nonexistent addresses return 404.
Add nonsense to your URL, /asdfgh/. If a page appears instead of a 404, that is a soft 404 and it drags on the whole site’s search performance.
Browsers do not show status codes; use the network panel in developer tools.
3. Does every page have a different title.
Look at the browser tab. If every page reads “My Website” or the same sentence, they look identical in search results and nobody can tell which to open.
4. Are the images compressed.
Check total transfer in the network panel. Over 3MB for a home page needs attention. Usually the cause is photographs uploaded straight from a phone.
5. How long it takes on a phone.
Throttle to slow 4G in developer tools, tick disable cache, refresh. That is what a customer’s first visit looks like. Over five seconds needs work.
6. Does the contact route work.
Submit your own form and confirm the email arrives. Frequently skipped, and a silently broken form is the most expensive failure there is — you receive no enquiries and assume nobody is asking.
Four things to do after launch
In order, within the first month.
1. Set up Google Search Console.
Free, ten minutes. The only place to see your site as Google sees it, and it emails you when something goes wrong.
Submit your sitemap once verified. It affects how quickly you are indexed.
2. Create a Google Business Profile.
Essential for a local business. Many people searching for a service nearby see map results and call from there without opening a website at all.
Free, and for several industries the map produces more visibility than the site.
3. Get a few external links.
No purchase needed. Social profile bios, industry association listings, partner websites, a local chamber of commerce — all natural and genuine.
Two purposes: helping Google discover you, and providing a basic credibility signal. With no website anywhere linking to yours, Google has little route to finding it.
4. Make your company details consistent.
Name, address and phone identical across the website, the business profile, social accounts and invoices. While they disagree, neither search engines nor AI can confirm these are one company.
Publish your company registration number if you have one. A verifiable fact persuades more than any adjective.
Then wait a fortnight
Do not search for yourself on day three and worry. Indexing usually takes days to two weeks, and ranking takes months.
After two weeks, search site:yourdomain to see how many pages are indexed, and read the queries report in Search Console, which shows what people searched before seeing you.
That query list is the most valuable data available. If it is nearly empty, or contains only your company name, then nobody except people who already know you is finding you through search — and what comes next is content rather than changing the website.
When to bring someone in
Everything above is doable alone. These situations are worth help:
The site starts taking money or personal information. Payments and data handling involve other people’s money and privacy, and the consequences are asymmetric. Not a good place to learn as you go.
You no longer want to look after it. Websites need maintenance — updates, certificate renewal, backups, responding to failures. Skipped, they do not break immediately, they decay. If you will not spend that time, someone should.
The fifth revision starts breaking things. If changing one thing breaks another, the structure has come apart and adding more will not improve it.
The business it carries can no longer absorb mistakes. Two hours down while experimenting is fine; two hours down when it takes your orders is not.
One thing worth keeping
The conversations you had with AI while building this — how the requirements were worked out, why things are arranged this way, which alternatives were rejected — tidy them up and keep them.
Two uses: returning to change something in three months without reconstructing your own reasoning, and handing the site to someone else, where that record is worth more than the site itself. What a new person most needs is not what it is, but why it is that way.
We welcome clients who arrive with their own version. The problems you have already hit and the requirements you have already settled carry straight over, and that stage moves far faster than starting from nothing.