Joshua Jacoui argues that the best web design approach in 2026 is hybrid: human oversight paired with AI for content and images, not pure AI or traditional WordPress alone. He warns that improper Astro pipelines destroy performance, WordPress sites face growing security risks, and AI alone produces uneven results on meta tags and schema.
My name is Joshua Jacoby, and I'm the owner of My Favorite Web Designs. And I want to talk a little bit about getting a website built for your company or business in 2026. It can be an intimidating selection process. It's hard to know if you should use a designer that's dedicated to artificial intelligence, and offers to build everything using Claude Desktop at a very low price, or if you should go for a traditional web designer who's doing things in WordPress or in HTML and PHP, or if you should find a designer who's using some of the newer cutting-edge headless platforms like Astro. And the answer is somewhere in the middle for everyone. First, I would say if you have an existing website, you don't necessarily want to see change right away. Because that can cause your rankings to completely reroll. If your business is very successful, then that type of a transition can be traumatizing and iterating is much better than a full change. But if you're going for a brand new scratch website, the first thing I'd look for in your website design company is how graphic heavy they are. Are they actually doing their own images? Do they have graphic design in-house? Are they able to iterate on graphic design quickly? So it doesn't become a slow, laborious process to get exactly to the look and the feel that you need. And that's still very relevant today. As you get more and more of these AI websites being built up with very little thought and concern to brand identity, you're going to see a pushback against that kind of AI slop. So having a well-designed website with a personal, cool feel and consistent brand identity throughout your marketing materials is still going to be a really important part of building your brand. So that's part of it, is making sure that you have good graphic design. Now onto the coding question. Even though we are traditionally a WordPress website design company, we have evolved greatly over the last 2 years because WordPress is getting hacked more now than it ever has before. AI, which is enabling great things in terms of what we can create on the web, is also enabling hacking at unprecedented And we don't trust that old Linux servers are safe. We don't trust that WordPress websites are gonna be safe. So some of the newer technologies are very attractive. Astro is one of the best ones out there because it's headless and it runs on the Cloudflare Edge, which is one of the best global distribu— global distribution networks out there. So Astro, very strong option. Um, in the past, we didn't necessarily love working with Astro just because it's a completely new technology and some of the customizations that we wanted to achieve were a little more, uh, difficult than they were traditionally with WordPress. But using AI with human designers together, we're able to get exactly the look and the feel that we want, adjust it through the mobile, adjust it through the tablet, make sure that each of the landing pages is serving to the best of its optimization. So the page speed is consistent. It's a really great platform, and when you tie it into AI, you can kind of juice it at scale. Another thing I'll say about that type of a conversion or that type of a build is it's assumed that Astro inherently has amazing page speed, and it does. Astro by itself does have great page speed, and it does serve at the edge, but depending on how you build it, you can completely ruin the page speed on your Astro. So you wanna make sure you're utilizing your Astro pipeline just as it's intended to be utilized. So not all the Astro websites out there are correct either, and you should ask for examples of websites that those designers have done and then do a little analysis on those websites to see where they may or may not be hitting the mark. In terms of how we use AI, we've had to really detail and customize the projects that audit the websites that we're building for everything from featured images to social share cards to the meta descriptions, the title tags, the schema, keeping schema current based on the current specs, all kinds of different things that you would assume that AI would know because it seems so smart, but it's really, really smart about some things and really, really oblivious about other things. So a strong human hand guiding an AI can create websites that are better than the websites of yesteryear, but simply trying to let the AI do it by itself can turn into quite a nightmare. So when you're making your selection on what website design company you want to utilize, definitely run for the hills if you find anyone that seems like they're entirely AI-based and doesn't have a human coding component strongly built into the whole scenario. The last thing I'll say about selecting a website design company and selecting a website that you want to use is make sure that you have your marketing game plan already laid out in front of you. We like these Astro websites hooked in through Cloud Desktop because we can create content at scale and clients can go back and forth with the content. Like we typically would create an article and then have it prompt 5 to 10 questions for the client. And then those questions help personalize it and then we'll get a shot list based off of that and then ask the client to do photos. And then those photos will help finish off the personalization for it. We do things like embedding reviews, but having the marketing game plan for the website that you're building is important too, because if you just build a website that looks great, it might not serve all your marketing purposes. And if you just built a website that's strong for SEO and you needed an e-commerce component tied into ads and you don't have a plan for that, then you might find yourself working double website duty. So think with your ultimate marketing objective when you're selecting the website platform and the website designer who's going to work on your stuff. All right. Thank you.
