Modern Ai frameworks are making it increasingly easy to build landing pages and small-scale websites. But “easy” and “effective” aren’t the same thing.
If you’ve spent any time on social media lately, you’ve probably seen someone posting about creating full website in ten minutes using tools like Lovable, Bolt, or Replit. Type a prompt, watch the magic happen, and — boom — you’ve got a website.
This is called “vibe coding,” and honestly? The results can look good. At first glance.
But here’s the thing — an insurance agency website that looks cool, and a website that actually works for your business and for your end-customers, are two very different animals.
If you’re a agency owner who’s been tempted to vibe code your way to a new site, you deserve to know what you’re actually getting — and more importantly, what you’re giving up.
Let’s break it down….
The Good
Let’s give credit where it’s due. Vibe coding tools have genuinely lowered the barrier to entry for getting something online, and that’s not nothing.
Speed is a factor. You can go from zero to a visually complete landing page in minutes. For someone who needs a quick prototype, a hackathon project, or a proof of concept to pitch an idea internally, that’s genuinely powerful. These tools are excellent at turning a vague idea into something tangible fast.
The visual quality is getting better. Modern AI tools have been trained on thousands of websites, so the output tends to follow current design trends — generally clean layouts, solid typography choices, and reasonable color palettes. If you squint, it looks like a real website.
For small, personal projects, it can be perfectly fine. Portfolio site for a photography hobby? Fan page for your fantasy football league? A simple event page for a family reunion? Vibe code away. The stakes are low, and the tools are surely capable.
But once real business outcomes enter the picture — leads, revenue, search visibility, user trust, integrations and functionality — the calculus changes dramatically.
The Bad
This is where things start to unravel for vibe coded websites.
The problems with vibe coded websites aren’t always obvious on day one, and to someone who doesn’t know what they don’t know about code, they may never be obvious.
They tend to surface weeks or months later, after you’ve already invested time, pointed your domain at the thing, and told your clients to check out your new site.
The big SEO Problem: Client-Side Rendering (CSR)
Most vibe coded sites are not natively great for SEO. In fact, they could be invisible to Google and LLMs.
This is the big one, and most people building with vibe coding tools have no idea it’s happening. What I’m about to explain is a little nerdy, but follow me here…
The vast majority of these Ai website builder tools (Lovable, Bolt, etc..) generate Single Page Applications (SPAs) that rely on Client-Side Rendering (CSR). That means when someone — or more importantly, when Google — visits your website, the server doesn’t send back a fully-formed HTML page.
Instead, it sends a mostly-empty HTML shell and a big bundle of JavaScript. The browser then executes that JavaScript to build the page content on the fly.
It’s actually pretty cool how it works, BUT, this means they aren’t “hydrated” by default on initial DOM / page load. In many cases, SPA’s hydrate after the initial dom request – and this is where search engines like Google struggle.
P.S. the DOM is essentially the code tree produced by elements on a page that only a browser can read; humans can’t visually see DOM structure, but they can see the elements that make up the dom if that makes sense.
If you want to nerd-out for a more complex explanation of this, go here.
Here’s why that’s a major problem:
Google has to work harder to see your content
While Google can render JavaScript, it doesn’t do it immediately.
Your page enters what’s called the “rendering queue,” which can delay indexing by hours, days, or even weeks. Or worse, the site isn’t indexed at all.
Meanwhile, a traditionally-built or server-rendered site gets crawled and indexed almost immediately. In competitive markets, that delay alone can cost you.
Critical SEO elements often get lost
Title tags, meta descriptions, Open Graph tags, canonical URLs, structured data — the stuff that tells search engines what your page is about and how to display it in results — are frequently either missing, duplicated across every page, or generated incorrectly in vibe coded sites.
Most of these tools simply don’t think about metadata because the prompts don’t ask for it, and the AI doesn’t prioritize it.
What’s more updating this on page-by-page basis via conversational would take days if not weeks.
Internal linking structure tends to be flat or nonexistent
A logical hierarchy of pages connected by purposeful internal links can help Google understand your website structure easier, which is never a bad thing.
Vibe coded sites typically produce a single-page experience or a handful of loosely connected pages with no real linking strategy. Search engines use internal links to understand site structure and distribute ranking authority.
Without internal linking on some level, even on a basic level, it could make it harder for Google to crawl and index certain pages on your site.
You get zero crawl budget efficiency
When Googlebot visits your CSR site, it burns through crawl budget just loading and rendering JavaScript before it even gets to your content.
For insurance agency sites competing against established players & highly authoritative websites (this describes literally every single IA agency), every crawl matters. Wasting those visits on empty shells is like paying for billboard space and leaving it blank.
The bottom line: if people finding you through Google & LLMs like ChatGPT matters to your business — and for most businesses, it does — a vibe coded SPA is actively working against you.
The Customer Experience Problem
A website isn’t just something people look at. It’s something they use. And this is where vibe coded sites often fall apart in ways that directly impact your bottom line.
I’ve said this on stage, on webinars and many different times over the past 10 years, but your agency website isn’t for you. It’s for prospects and customers. You are not the target-market for your own website.
The user experience is critical and can make or break your website.
Performance suffers greatly
Vibe coded websites ship large JavaScript bundles that need to download and execute before anything useful appears on screen. On slower connections or older devices — which a meaningful chunk of your potential customers are using — this means blank screens, loading spinners, and frustrated visitors hitting the back button.
Google’s own data shows that 53% of mobile visits are abandoned if a page takes longer than three seconds to load.
The reality is, vibe code is often spaghetti code.
Accessibility is an afterthought, if it’s a thought at all
Vibe coding tools rarely produce accessible markup. Missing alt text on images, poor heading hierarchy, inadequate color contrast, no keyboard navigation support, broken screen reader experiences — these aren’t edge cases. They’re the norm.
Beyond being the right thing to do, accessibility failures expose your business to ADA compliance risk and can exclude a significant portion of potential customers.
Forms, notifications, and conversions break constantly
Contact forms, quote request forms, booking widgets — the things that actually generate business — tend to be fragile in vibe coded sites.
They might look fine but often fail to actually submit & store data, send confirmation emails to you and the prospect, or integrate with your CRM.
Did you know, you need your own mail server to actually send notifications from your forms? Vibe platforms don’t do this for you natively.
If you’re reading this right now and have a vibe coded site, there is a 99% chance people have tried to submit a form, and you never knew about it.
At AdvisorEvolved, the mail server is baked into our tech stack at no additional cost (or setup) to you. You probably didn’t know that because there is no reason to tell you (yes, we hide a lot of complexities from out clients).
Responsive design is surface-level
The site might technically resize on a phone, but “responsive” means more than just fitting on a smaller screen.
It means rethinking navigation, touch targets, content priority, and load behavior for mobile users.
Vibe coded sites tend to just shrink everything down and hope for the best.
Integrations and functionality
Want to build multiple forms with conditional logic, conditional notifications or confirmations? How about a conversational form with videos on each step of the form?
With Advisor Evolved, it takes minutes to create these assets. With a vibe coded site? You’re in for weeks if not months worth of prompting, fixing, debugging, and it still might not work the way you want.
What’s more, we have build dozens of custom API integrations with various players in the insurance ecosystem like AgencyZoom, CanopyConnect, Hawksoft, and more coming.
We also have an integration with YouTube Shorts.
Believe me when I tell you, trying to build all of this on your own, is quite frankly a huge pain in the a$$.
Design Language
I mentioned a second ago that Ai builders are trained on many other websites. This is good, but also bad at the same time.
Sure, when you are building websites for the same industry, there are going to be certain layouts and elements that should be repeated because they are essential to that type of business, but in 12 years, I’ve never met a business owner who’s said “I want my website to look like every other website”, yet that’s essentially what Ai does.
You can spot an Ai-generated site a mile away.
There’s also no middle ground with the generated design language. Vibe coded sites are either extremely generic looking, or super over-designed to the point where its actually distracting.
Simply put, you’ll never get a truly unique design when you vibe code a site.
The Ugly
Now we get to the stuff that can actually cause real damage.
Security Is Not a Vibe
This might be the most under appreciated and unknown risk of vibe coding.
When AI generates your website code, it’s drawing from patterns in training data. It doesn’t think about security. It doesn’t run threat models. It doesn’t know what your site shouldn’t do.
API keys and secrets end up in client-side code
This is shockingly common. If your vibe coded site connects to any external service — a payment processor, an email API, a database — there’s a real chance those credentials are sitting in your JavaScript bundle, visible to anyone who opens browser dev tools.
That’s not a theoretical risk. It’s a “someone just found your AgencyZoom secret key” risk.
No input validation or sanitization
If your site has any kind of form or user input, AI-generated code rarely implements proper validation on both the client and server side. That opens the door to cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, and other attacks that are basic hygiene in professional web development but completely absent from vibe coded output.
Dependencies are unvetted, and usually out-dated
Notice how Claude Code and other tools push you towards certain tech stacks like Supabase and Vercel. Those two are much more established and safe, but there are many more that aren’t.
AI tools frequently pull in third-party packages and libraries without any consideration for whether those packages are maintained, trustworthy, or known to have vulnerabilities.
You end up with a supply chain you’ve never audited and can’t even identify, and no more stable than a house of cards.
There’s no concept of environment separation
Professional sites have distinct development, staging, and production environments with appropriate access controls. Vibe coded sites are typically one environment — production — with no safeguards, no deployment pipeline, and no rollback capability.
If something breaks, you’re scrambling.
Authentication, if it exists, is often implemented incorrectly
Rolling your own authentication is hard, even when being guided by Ai.
It’s one of the things seasoned developers get wrong regularly. The chances that a vibe coding tool produces secure authentication with proper session management, token handling, and password storage are essentially zero.
What’s worse, you are locked in the their platforms’ authentication protocol, meaning you don’t have the flexibility to use your own if need be, which at a certain point, you will.
The “Prompt Tax” is real
At first, it seems cool, even fun to have a conversation with a bot that’s building out a web page. The instant gratification is real.
BUT… it gets old fast, especially when making smaller changes that the Ai doesn’t get right the first time.
Need to change verbiage on a page or section? You have to ask the agent and spell out every little detail instead of just typing it in yourself.
Need to change colors, navigation menus, page structure? You have to ask the agent.
And here’s the deal, the agent WILL get things wrong, repeatedly.
Now multiply those prompts, errors and fixes across multiple pages or posts on your site, and it will easily take you 2 hours to do something that should take 2 minutes in WordPress.
You’ll soon realize the importance and ease-of-use of having a true CMS (content management system) like WordPress to make quick or even complex changes to your site.
You Don’t Actually Own What You Think You Own
I’ve heard a few people say they wanted to vibe code their site so they “own” the site. I personally think that’s a silly conversation, but thats a conversation for another day, ha!
Here’s the reality — you don’t own any of it.
This is what we call vendor lock-in.
Vendor lock-in is real and no one realizes this…
Building a site on Lovable or Replit? Your site lives on their platform, built with their tooling, databases, deployed to their infrastructure using their dependencies.
If the tool shuts down, has a prolonged outage, changes pricing, or pivots — and in the current AI landscape, all three are common — you’re scrambling to rebuild from scratch.
On the contrary, Advisor Evolved websites are built on WordPress, the largest open-source CMS in the world. Open-source beats closed-source any day of the week. Thats a fact.
We self-manage, self-host, and self-maintain the environments for our clients without them needing to do, or set anything up (again, another complexity our clients aren’t even aware of).
Should something weird happen, the websites are all backed up and completely portable.
When your site lives one someone else’s environment, whether it be an Ai builder, or something like Wix, Squarespace, or DUDA, its all closed-source. Think of an iMac computer vs. a P.C.
With an open-source framework like WordPress, its like having a custom computer build where you can add, remove, mix and match any components you want.
With a vibe coded site, you have zero control and zero true ownership over your site in the grand scheme of things.
The code is often unmaintainable
Even if you can export the source code, what you get is AI-generated spaghetti that no developer wants to touch. Trust me, I’ve tested this with our own developers lol.
It’s not written for humans to read, maintain, or extend. Hiring a professional to “just clean it up” often costs more than building it properly would have in the first place.
There’s no migration path
Need to add a blog? Integrate with a CRM? Scale to handle more traffic? Add e-commerce?
Get ready to burn tokens and refactor what the LLM didn’t get right the first, second, or third time.
The architecture of most vibe coded sites doesn’t support incremental improvement. Every new requirement becomes a reason to potentially start over.
There’s no real support
Sure, Lovable can have a conversation with you in a chat window, but that’s not the same thing as having built-in customer support. If you’re not someone who can read code, or write code without Ai, you will need support much sooner than you realize.
You can ask any Advisor Evolved customer, and they’ll be quick to praise how fast, effective, and thorough our customer support is, and we strive to be the absolute best value and best bang for your buck in the industry when it comes to the product and support we offer.
Think you’re saving money? Think again…
Vibe coded sites on the surface may seem “cheaper” than a custom site or fully-managed site, but the reality is, most people who vibe code their sites are 3-6 months away from asking someone to rebuild it again anyway.
You might think you’re saving money, but believe me, you won’t be.
We know this for a fact. We’ve had a couple customers try to roll their own sites, only to come back two weeks later, asking us for help.
So What Should You Actually Do?
Look — vibe coding tools are impressive technology, and they absolutely have a place.
If you’re prototyping, experimenting, or building something where the stakes are low, go for it.
Have fun. Learn from it.
But if your website is a business asset — if it needs to generate leads, rank in search engines, protect customer data, integrate with other tools, and represent your brand to the world — it deserves more than a vibe.
It deserves a strategy. It deserves someone who understands that the site visitors you can’t see (search engine crawlers) matter just as much as the ones you can. It deserves code that’s secure by default, not by accident. And it deserves an architecture that grows with your business instead of holding it back.
The gap between “I have a website” and “I have a website that works” has never been wider.
Make sure you’re on the right side of it.
Should Agencies Own Their Website?