An office worker with no coding background hit the limits of a WordPress company site and rebuilt it as a PHP site through vibe coding — talking to AI instead of writing code. This post covers what could be built just by describing it, what I still had to learn myself, like hosting, domains and email, and the long process of fixing things along the way.
An office worker who can’t code ended up running the website
I’m not a developer. I work in sales support, and somewhere along the way I also became the person in charge of our company website. My “coding” consisted of searching for snippets and pasting them in.
Today I run a website built in PHP by talking with AI. This blog, Agentickorea, is being built and refined the same way.
People now call this way of building vibe coding. Instead of writing code line by line, you describe the result you want in plain words and let AI write the code.
This post is a record of going from WordPress to a PHP site built with vibe coding — what I went through and where I got stuck. The short version: building it was surprisingly fast, but making it actually usable took far longer.
I started with WordPress
WordPress is usually the first tool people recommend when someone without coding skills needs a website. I set up WordPress with the Elementor page builder and the lightweight Hello theme to build our company site.
The advantages were clear. You could lay out pages by dragging and dropping, and any feature you needed was a plugin away. I really did build a company profile, product pages and a contact page without any coding knowledge.
The problems started once the site was live. My difficulties came down to three things.
1. The site was heavy and slow. Even with a lightweight theme, the page builder and plugins kept piling on files, and I was always waiting for pages to load.
2. Maintenance was harder than expected. Plugin updates, conflicts between features, and styles that showed in the editor but not on the live page — problems whose causes were hard to track down kept coming up.
3. Every new feature meant installing another plugin, which made the site heavier and gave me even more to maintain.
This doesn’t mean WordPress is a bad tool. It’s just that the site was carrying far more than the features I actually used, and I had no way to trim that weight myself.
What AI changed: a site you can really build by talking
I had asked AI about code before. But it was only after GPT-5 arrived in ChatGPT that I felt I could build an entire site from start to finish.
When I tried it myself, the biggest change was that I didn’t need to know the code. For example, I could simply say:
“Make the front page of a blog in PHP with a white background and four recent-post cards in a row. On mobile, show one card per row.”
With a request like that, the AI produces the file structure and code in one go. If I don’t like something, I just ask in words — make the text a bit bigger, round the card corners.
I chose PHP for a simple reason: it runs on most web hosting without extra setup, and I can build only the features I need. The site now runs on PHP with a MariaDB database and plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
At first I copied code from the ChatGPT chat window and pasted it in. Now I also use coding agents like Claude Code and Codex, which read and edit the files on my computer directly.
Talking wasn’t enough: the basics I had to learn
I could build pages and features by talking, but actually connecting the site to the internet was different. AI could explain how, but going into each service’s control panel and changing settings was still a person’s job.
Here are the basic terms I learned the hard way, in plain words.
1. Domain: the site’s address. After buying one, you have to point it to a server.
2. Hosting: the server space where the site’s files live. Check the PHP version and whether a database is included first.
3. DNS settings: the connection table that links your domain to your hosting. Merging the www and non-www addresses into one also starts here.
4. Security certificate: the setting that puts https in front of your address. Without it, browsers mark your site as not secure.
5. Email setup: to send and receive mail with your company domain, you need separate mail records in DNS.
6. Deployment: uploading the files you made on your computer to the server.
Email gave me the most trouble. Mail sent from our company domain wasn’t reaching recipients properly, and the cause turned out to be sender authentication settings called SPF and DKIM. I had never even heard of them, so I went back and forth between the mail service and the DNS panel, asking AI one step at a time.
I learned something from that. Knowing even a little of the terminology makes your questions precise, and precise questions get precise answers from AI. You don’t need to know how to code, but you do need to know what pieces a website is made of.
Building is fast; making it usable takes a long time
The first page came together really quickly. But once I tried to run the site for real, the missing pieces showed up one by one.
• Pages where text got cut off or cards overlapped on phones
• An admin page for writing and editing posts
• A way to keep a history of edits
• A sitemap and RSS for search visibility
• Security settings, backups, and a way to roll back when something breaks
And the fixes kept coming. Fixing one place sometimes broke another, and the design we clearly agreed on yesterday was often unknown to the AI today. When a conversation gets long or a new one starts, what was decided earlier doesn’t carry over.
So I found three things that help.
1. I wrote a working-rules document. The site name, colors, folder structure and things not to do are all in one file, and the AI reads it first every time we start working.
2. I kept a work log. Writing down when, what and why something changed reduced repeated mistakes in the next session.
3. I stopped uploading straight to the server. I check the PC and mobile views in a local preview on my computer first, run the checking tools I asked the AI to build, and only then deploy.
What I realized through all of this is that AI does what you ask quickly, but deciding what to ask is still up to me. A usable site doesn’t appear in one shot; it takes shape through many rounds of checking and fixing.
What to check before using this at work
If you want to build a company or personal site with vibe coding, I recommend preparing in this order. These are things I only realized I needed after going through it myself.
1. Write down what the site needs to do first. Listing features like a company profile, product pages and a contact form also makes your requests to AI easier.
2. Learn roughly what domains, hosting and DNS are. You don’t need deep knowledge, but you need the terms to ask good questions.
3. Set up a way to check things on your own computer first. If you edit a live site directly, visitors see any problem as it happens.
4. Keep working rules and a log. Even when the AI doesn’t remember the last conversation, the documents remain.
5. Prepare a way to roll back. I keep a history of changes with Git, and I set that up by asking AI as well.
6. Have a person check security and privacy to the end. For sensitive parts like passwords, inquiry data and the admin page, it’s better not to trust AI-written code blindly.
Vibe coding fits some cases better than others. If your site is simple, like a company profile or a blog, speed matters, and you can keep setting aside time for fixes, it’s well worth trying.
On the other hand, if you need the site live right away with no time to tinker, or you need proven features like payments, an existing tool like WordPress may be the better choice.
Closing thoughts
Vibe coding let me, someone who can’t code, build a website myself. The heaviness I felt with WordPress went away by building only the features I needed.
But AI didn’t run the site for me. I had to understand basics like domains and email, and the usable site came out of countless rounds of checking and fixing.
No AI is ever finished, but there is always a next step. If you’re trying vibe coding for the first time, I suggest starting by building a single page just by describing it, rather than an ambitious site.
