How to Vibe Code a Website: Blank Page to Live Link

There is a version of this story where you type a sentence into a chat box, a website appears, you press publish and go to bed pleased with yourself. It does happen. It also tends to produce a website that looks lovely on your laptop and lets you down everywhere else: on a customer's phone with a weak signal, in a search engine, or in the mind of a visitor who wanted your phone number and could not find it.

So this is a guide to how to vibe code a website properly, from a blank page to a live link. It assumes a small business, a personal site or a project page of a handful of screens. You do not need to be a programmer. You do need a little patience and a willingness to check your own work, because that is where good results come from.

Before anything else: is a template the better answer?

It is worth being honest at the very start. For a simple site that presents your business, a template-based builder is often cheaper, more predictable and less likely to surprise you. Our business website builder is exactly that, and it does not use AI to write your pages, which is a strength when reliability is what you want.

Vibe coding a website makes sense when you want something more individual than a template allows, or when you enjoy the process and want to learn. If that is you, carry on.

Step one: gather your real material

The biggest difference between a good AI-built site and a mediocre one is not the tool. It is what you give it. Before you open anything, collect these.

• Two or three plain sentences about what your business does and who it serves.
• The pages you want. For most small sites: home, about, services or products, contact.
• Real photos of your work, your premises or your team. Generic pictures make every business look identical.
• Your logo and colours, if you have them.
• Contact details: phone, WhatsApp, email, address, opening hours.
• Prices, if you are willing to show them.

An AI with nothing to go on will invent things. It will write pleasant, empty paragraphs and pick colours at random. Feed it real facts and it has something worth building.

Step two: write a brief instead of a wish

Compare two ways of starting. "Make me a nice website for my bakery" will produce something bland. A better opening reads like a proper brief: "Create a simple website for a bakery in Ibadan called Adunni Cakes. Pages: home, cakes, about, contact. The main goal is for visitors to order by WhatsApp. Warm colours, made for phones first. The contact page needs a WhatsApp button, phone number and opening hours. Keep the code light and simple."

Look at what that does. It names the place and the business, states the main goal, lists the pages, describes the feel, and asks for something lightweight. That last request is quietly the most important, as the next step explains.

Step three: insist on light and fast

AI tools love to produce impressive-looking sites with heavy animations, huge images and lots of extras. For a small business, that is usually the wrong instinct. Many of your visitors will arrive on a phone, often on a modest connection, often paying for data by the megabyte. A heavy page loses them before it finishes loading.

Ask for plain, light pages. Ask for images to be compressed and sized for the screen. Avoid autoplay video and big sliding banners. Then test it yourself: open the site on your own phone using mobile data, not wifi, and count how long you wait. If you are waiting, your visitors are leaving.

Free speed-checking tools from the search companies will score a page and point at what is slow. You do not need to fix every suggestion, but a warning about image size or slow loading is worth taking to your AI tool as a task.

Step four: build page by page, and read every word

Start with the home page. Ask for changes in small steps, such as a different heading or a clearer button, and look at each result before you continue. When the home page is right, move on to the next.

Read every word the AI writes, because it has habits, and some of them can hurt a business. It may claim things that are simply untrue: awards you never won, years of experience you do not have, customers you never served. It may invent glowing reviews. That is dishonest, it can put you on the wrong side of advertising rules, and a customer who catches it will not trust you again. Delete anything you cannot stand behind. A smaller set of true claims serves you better than a grand set of false ones.

Watch, too, for filler that could describe any business anywhere. Replace it with specifics: which areas you deliver to, how long an order takes, what people love most about you.

Step five: the basics that decide whether people find you

A beautiful site that nobody finds is a hobby. The basics of being findable are not complicated, and you can check them without technical knowledge.

• A clear title for each page. Something like "Custom Cakes in Ibadan | Adunni Cakes", not the same title on every page.
• A short description for each page. Search engines often show it under your title.
• One main heading per page, with clear subheadings. It helps readers as much as search engines.
• Descriptions for your images. Short text explaining each picture, which also helps people using screen readers.
• Your address and phone as real text. Not only inside a picture.
• A business profile on the major map services. For local businesses this often matters more than the site.

No one can honestly promise you a ranking, and results take time. What you can do is remove the obvious obstacles, so that good work is not held back by a badly set up site.

Step six: test the contact route like a customer

For most small businesses, the site exists to make people contact you. So test that above everything.

• Fill in the contact form from a different phone and email, and confirm that the message actually arrives. A form that looks fine and delivers nothing is one of the most common failures of quickly generated sites.
• Tap the WhatsApp button on a phone. Does it open the right chat with the right number?
• Tap the phone number. Does it start a call?
• Click every link, including the ones in the footer.

Then hand your phone to a friend who has never seen the site and ask them to find your opening hours. Watch where they hesitate. Someone new will spot problems you have stopped seeing.

Step seven: go live under your own name

When it is ready, publish it, and do so with care about who owns what.

Register your own domain name, in your name, with your own email address. Do not let a tool or a helper register it in their account on your behalf. Make sure the address starts with https. Find out where the files are stored and whether you can download them. Write down every login, and keep them safe, with a copy for someone you trust. If your tool can save your code to a storage service like GitHub, turn that on, so a copy of your site lives somewhere you control and every earlier version can be recovered.

Step eight: keep it alive

A website is not finished when it goes live. Opening hours change, prices change, links break. Put a reminder in your calendar to review the whole site every few months. If you collect information from visitors, through a form or a mailing list, remember that data protection rules exist in Nigeria and you owe your visitors reasonable care. A short privacy note explaining what you collect and why is a sensible addition.

Where sites go wrong

Because a website feels low-risk, people relax, and small mistakes slip in. The common ones are invented claims that nobody removed, pictures used without permission, a form that delivers nothing, and pages that are lovely on a big screen but slow on a phone. Every one of those can be avoided with the checks above.

Things change when you add features. The moment your site takes payments, holds user accounts or stores customer details, it stops being a simple website and becomes an application, and the care required goes up. That is the time to bring in someone who can review it properly. We wrote about the risks in is vibe coding bad.

A sensible middle path

You do not have to pick between a fully AI-built site and a fully professional one. Many people generate a first version, then ask a developer to review it, tidy the rough edges and take responsibility for the technical side. That is often quicker and cheaper than starting from nothing, and you keep the design you like.

If you would like that kind of second look, or a fresh site built for you, talk to us, or see our audit and rescue service. Still deciding whether this route suits you? Start with what vibe coding is, and see which tools beginners should open first.