AI Website Builders Are Taking Over Routine Web Development Work
Survey data cited by TechRadar suggests many small business owners now build sites with AI, as freelance web development listings decline.
According to TechRadar, freelance website development work has dropped sharply since 2024, and the outlet ties that decline to a rise in business owners using artificial intelligence to build their own sites. TechRadar reports that research commissioned by Bluehost found 53 percent of surveyed business owners had adopted AI website builders instead of hiring professional developers.
The same coverage cites a 59 percent fall in website design job postings since early 2024. Listings for PHP, WordPress and HTML work are also described as declining, according to the report. TechRadar says the survey respondents reported saving about $850 and 32 hours by using AI tools.
The source material does not describe the survey's methodology, sample size or how the comparison to job postings was measured, so those details should be checked against the original research before drawing firm conclusions. The reporting focuses on American entrepreneurs, and the outlet's framing suggests the shift is still unfolding rather than complete.
Background
Website building has changed considerably over the past two decades. In the early web, sites were hand-coded in HTML and styled with CSS, which created steady demand for specialists. Content management systems such as WordPress later allowed non-programmers to publish pages using templates and plugins, which lowered the cost of entry but still often required someone to configure and maintain the site.
Drag-and-drop website builders followed, offering hosted templates and simple editors aimed at small businesses that did not want to hire a developer. Many freelancers built their practices around this middle tier, handling custom layouts, integrations, hosting setup and fixes for clients who outgrew templates.
Generative AI adds a new layer to this trend. Tools can now produce page layouts, copy and basic code from a short prompt, and some products bundle domain registration, hosting and design into one workflow. This tends to pressure the simplest and most repetitive jobs first, while complex projects involving custom software, security, accessibility, or large-scale maintenance have historically been harder to automate fully. How far that boundary moves is an open question that the reporting does not settle.
Why it matters
For freelance developers, the most common routine projects, such as small brochure sites and template customizations, are where demand appears to be weakening. That raises questions about how independent workers will find income and which skills will stay valuable, such as consulting, design judgment, and troubleshooting when automated output breaks.
For business owners, the appeal is clear: lower upfront costs and faster launches can make a web presence possible for businesses that could not previously afford one. But reliance on automated tools can also mean less control over code quality, data handling and long-term ownership of a site, which may matter more as sites collect customer information or process payments.
The story also highlights how survey-based findings from companies with commercial interests in website products should be read carefully. The direction of the trend may be real, but the size of the shift and its cause are harder to pin down from one data source.
What to watch
Watch for independent data on freelance job postings and hiring trends from sources beyond the survey cited. Look at whether the share of business owners using AI site builders continues to grow, and whether satisfaction holds up over time, especially once sites need updates, security patches or changes in response to customer needs.
Pay attention to how freelancers and agencies reposition their services, whether toward strategy, custom integrations, or maintenance. Also watch for policy or platform changes affecting data, accessibility requirements, and the terms under which AI-generated site content is hosted and owned.
Viewpoints
Commentary from our columns: three angles on this story.
The Skeptic open questions and weak points
The headline numbers are striking, but they deserve a closer look before anyone declares the end of web development work. A survey commissioned by a hosting company that sells website tools is a source with an obvious stake in the answer. That does not make the findings false, but it does mean the questions worth asking are the ones the report may not emphasize. How were respondents chosen? What counts as adopting an AI builder, and does that include someone who only tried one template? Is a fall in job postings the same as a fall in paid work, given that many projects never appear on job boards at all?
There is also a difference between a simple brochure site and a business that depends on its website to take orders. The first may indeed be easier to automate, while the second still tends to need careful handling. Savings of $850 and 32 hours sound compelling, but they say little about what happens when something breaks at midnight. Until independent data confirms the trend and shows how these sites perform over several years, cautious readers should hold the conclusion loosely.
The Builder the engineer's view
From an engineering standpoint, the interesting part of this story is not that AI can generate a page. It is that the boring middle of web work, such as templates, basic forms and standard layouts, has become cheap to produce. The hard parts have not disappeared. Someone still has to decide how a site handles user data, how it recovers from failure, how it scales when traffic spikes, and how it stays secure after the original builder has moved on.
Generated sites can look finished while hiding fragile choices underneath: dependencies nobody reviews, embedded scripts nobody audited, or markup that fails for screen readers. Developers who understand how these systems fail will be more valuable than those who only know how to assemble pages. The builders who thrive will likely treat AI as a fast first draft and spend their time on the review, testing and integration steps that a quick prompt does not cover.
The User what changes for people who use it
For most people reading this, the change will show up in a simple way: setting up a website for a bakery, a dog groomer or a local club may take an afternoon instead of weeks of back-and-forth with a designer. That is a real benefit, especially for owners who have never had the budget or patience to hire help. A site that goes live sooner can bring in customers sooner, and that matters in a neighborhood where word of mouth still counts.
The trade-off is that the owner becomes the one who has to understand the site. Who can edit the text? What happens if the hosting plan changes? Where does the customer email list live? Owners who used to rely on a freelancer as a go-between may now carry those questions themselves. Before choosing an AI-built site, it helps to check how easy it is to export content, take a domain and move to another provider, because those answers decide how much freedom the owner keeps later.