In my last piece, From Clicks to Creativity: Exploring WordPress 7.0, I walked through what WordPress 7 brings to the table on paper: the new AI Client, the Abilities API, DataViews, PHP-only block registration, and all the foundational plumbing that’s supposed to make WordPress feel more “connected” than ever. It was a good article. It was also, if I’m honest, a lot of theory.

So this time, I skipped the documentation and did something a little riskier: I rebuilt my own personal site, nehalvyas.com, using WordPress 7. No test install. No throwaway sandbox. The real thing, with the real stakes of “what if I break my own homepage right before someone Googles me.”

It is still in the development stage at the time of writing this article. This is the story of what actually happened including the part where WordPress 7’s AI Website Builder impressed me, the part where it asked me to pull out my wallet, and the part where I closed the AI tools entirely and just built the thing myself.

Meeting the WordPress 7 AI Website Builder

I’ll admit I went in a little skeptical. I’ve used WordPress since version 3, and “AI-powered” has been bolted onto every second plugin for a couple of years now. Most of it is window dressing.

This wasn’t.

I launched the AI Website Builder, answered a handful of questions about what nehalvyas.com is for:  a personal brand site covering development, content, and a bit of travel and gaming on the side and within a few minutes it handed me a genuinely usable starting point. The layout made sense. The colour palette wasn’t the usual purple-gradient AI cliché. The content blocks were arranged the way an actual designer might arrange them, not just stacked top to bottom.

More than that, it gave me angles I hadn’t considered a way of grouping my writing and development work that I probably wouldn’t have landed on by staring at a blank Site Editor canvas. For a few minutes, I had that slightly uncomfortable thought every developer has had at some point in the last two years: okay, this might actually be good.

Where It Got Complicated: ZIPWP and the Paywall

Here’s where the story takes its turn. WordPress 7’s AI Website Builder leans on ZIPWP.com to generate and fully hand over the site it builds. The initial concept generation is free and honestly worth trying just to see what the AI comes up with. But to keep building on it, publish it, and unlock the full toolkit, you’re looking at a paid plan. ZIPWP’s free tier caps you to a handful of draft sites that expire quickly, and its paid plans start in the neighborhood of $19/month, scaling up from there depending on how many sites and AI credits you need.

To be clear, I don’t think that’s unreasonable. If you’re an agency spinning up client sites weekly, or a freelancer who bills for speed, that pricing pays for itself fast. It’s just not the right call for a personal blog I maintain mostly on evenings and weekends.

So I closed the tab, and decided to see what WordPress 7 could do without any AI at all.

Building It Manually: Astra, the Site Editor, and a Lot of Patience

I picked the free Astra theme: a reliable choice I’ve used on client projects before and started from a blank Site Editor canvas.

This is where WordPress 7 quietly won me over. The combination of the Site Editor, block-based patterns, and reusable templates is genuinely powerful now. I built out a homepage, an about section, and a blog template using pre-made patterns as a starting skeleton, then customized spacing, typography, and colour tokens directly in the editor no child theme, no custom CSS file, no plugin bloat.

Blocks like the saved me from installing two plugins I would have otherwise reached for out of habit. And the responsive controls meant I could fine-tune how sections behaved on mobile without switching between three different “preview” toggles and guessing.

It took longer than the AI builder, obviously. A couple of hours instead of a couple of minutes. But the site that came out the other end felt like mine in a way the AI draft, didn’t same bones, different personality.

AI as a Starting Point, Not a Finish Line

Looking back, the AI Website Builder didn’t waste my time, it gave me a direction. Some of the section groupings I ended up using in my manual build were straight-up inspired by what the AI suggested first. I just didn’t need to pay to keep that specific version; I needed the idea, and then I built it myself, my way.

That’s really the honest takeaway: AI here acted like a fast, opinionated collaborator, not a replacement for making the actual decisions.

What I Learned

• AI is excellent for ideation, not always for ownership. The free generation step is genuinely useful even if you never pay for ZIPWP.
• WordPress 7’s manual tools have caught up. The Site Editor, patterns, and templates are strong enough now that “no-code AI builder” isn’t the only fast path to a professional site.
• Astra remains a dependable free foundation, and it plays nicely with WordPress 7’s block tooling without needing heavy customization.
• Budget should drive the decision, not hype. ZIPWP-style AI builders make sense for agencies and high-volume site creation; manual building still makes sense for personal projects and tight budgets.
• The two approaches aren’t rivals. Used together: AI for inspiration, manual editing for execution they produce a better result than either alone.

First WordPress 7 Website Launching Soon

I don’t think the interesting question here is whether AI will replace web designers. Having actually used WordPress 7’s AI Website Builder and then rebuilt the same site by hand, I don’t think that’s what’s happening. What’s changing is how a site gets started, the blank-canvas problem is basically solved now, whether you use AI or not.

What still shapes the final result is the same thing that always has: taste, judgment, and the small decisions a human makes about what a site should feel like. WordPress 7 just gives you two solid ways to get there. My honest advice is to try both before picking a lane, you’ll learn something about your own workflow either way.

At the end of the day, WordPress 7’s built-in AI Website Builder can generate a professional-looking site concept in minutes, but publishing and fully unlocking it requires a paid ZIPWP.com plan.

On the other hand, the free Astra theme combined with WordPress 7’s Site Editor, patterns, and templates is powerful enough to build a professional site manually, without AI.

The best approach: AI-assisted or manual, depends on your budget, timeline, and how much you want the final site to reflect your own design choices. Get in touch with Developers Pub to learn more.