How to build a website with Claude, and what it costs

by Harry Watts Published 7 November 2026 9 min read

You no longer need to be a developer to give your business a fast website it owns outright, with no hosting bill. Claude Code, Anthropic's coding tool, writes the files, GitHub keeps every version of them, and Cloudflare Pages publishes them. GitHub and Cloudflare Pages are free, and Claude Code comes with Claude Pro, from £15 a month paid yearly at £180 including VAT (Claude's current prices). The running costs are the domain, which every website needs whoever builds it, and a Claude subscription. This site was built that way, starting in July 2026.

It works for a website you already have, too. If you're tired of managing your site through a clunky visual builder, paying a developer for every change, or waiting too long for changes to be made, you can move it over to the same setup and make the changes yourself.

The catch is the word "build". Asked whether a business should get AI to build it a new website, my answer is this:

I'd advise against getting AI to build anyone a website unattended.

However, I'd strongly recommend AI being the medium through which you build one.

Human input is paramount: experience, originality and personality, especially in the ideation and final polishing phases.

Claude Code writes the code. Deciding what the site says, and checking what it got wrong, is still your job.

The five jobs a website involves

A website builder such as Wix or Squarespace sells you five separate jobs as one product, which is why moving off one feels impossible. Built this way, each job is a different service, and it helps to know which is which before you start.

Two more free services make the contact form work. Cloudflare Turnstile is the spam check, free for up to 20 widgets (one spam check each, usually one per form), and Resend sends the email, free for 3,000 emails a month and 100 a day.

Why I built my own website

I bought searchlucid.com through Google Domains in June 2023 and put a placeholder up on Google Sites, while Search Lucid ran on word-of-mouth referrals. That August, Squarespace told me it had bought Google Domains, so my domain now sat with Squarespace while its DNS stayed with Google. Building a proper site from scratch was something I'd wanted to do for a while, and I started in July 2026.

I'm not an engineer, but I'm a technical marketer: I know how websites work under the hood. Two parts of the build were new to me, the contact form's email and the cache rules, and Claude guided every step. I used the Pro plan, moved to Max for the one month when most of the building happened, and went back to Pro. I paid for searchlucid.com ten years up front, so it isn't due for renewal until 2033.

How the pieces fit together

There's no code to learn, but there is a sequence to understand.

1. Claude Code writes the files. You describe a page, Claude Code writes it as plain HTML, and you read what it wrote before it goes anywhere.
2. GitHub keeps them. Every change is saved as a new version, so a mistake can be undone and the files are always yours.
3. Cloudflare Pages publishes them. Pages is connected to the GitHub repository and publishes each new version pushed to it.
4. The form runs on a small function. A few lines on Cloudflare check the Turnstile token and hand the message to Resend, which emails it to you.

The part I'd never done before, and the part that cost me most, was getting the contact form to send email. It ran through Resend, and for a day every test submission failed with a bare "server error". Cloudflare Pages keeps no logs of that by default, so there was nothing to read. I verified the domain and made a fresh API key, and it still failed. It took a temporary diagnostic, added just to read Resend's own error message, before the form delivered end to end that night.

Cloudflare's own documentation confirms the trap: Pages Functions logs are a live stream, and "Logs are not stored". If a form fails while nobody is watching, there's no record of why.

Your domain: who you rent it from and who points it

The registrar and the DNS are usually assumed to be the same company. They often aren't, and you may not have chosen either. Squarespace agreed in June 2023 to buy Google's domain business, about 10 million domains, and announced in November 2024 that the migration was complete. If your domain came from Google Domains, it now sits with Squarespace, and its DNS may still be on Google's servers, as mine was.

To publish at your bare domain (yourbusiness.co.uk, not just www.), Cloudflare Pages needs the domain's nameservers moved to Cloudflare. You make that change at the registrar. Before you do, copy every DNS record you have. Your email depends on the same DNS, so moving it has to carry the email records across exactly, or mail stops arriving.

What a UK business website still needs

No builder volunteers what a UK business must get right, and the guides to building a website with AI are mostly written for developers. A working UK business site still needs these.

• The registered-company line. A limited company's website must show where it is registered, its registered number, its registered office address and that it is a limited company (GOV.UK, from regulation 25 of the 2015 disclosure regulations). The footer is the usual place.
• A privacy notice. A contact form collects personal data, so UK GDPR expects you to tell people what happens to it (the ICO on the right to be informed).
• Consent before advertising tags. Advertising cookies need consent first, with no exception, and analytics does too unless it fits the ICO's narrow statistics exception. Building the banner properly is a guide of its own: Tag Manager with UK consent.
• Redirects from the old addresses. Moving off a builder, each old URL should send visitors and search engines to its new page with a permanent (301) redirect, or links and bookmarks break.
• The pages.dev copy kept out of Google. Cloudflare gives every project a free pages.dev address that stays live after your own domain is added. Preview versions are marked noindex automatically, but the main pages.dev address isn't. This site adds a noindex header to every page served from it; Cloudflare's own suggestion is to redirect it to your domain.

The failures are silent, and that is the real risk. Cloudflare Pages honours only five redirect statuses (301, 302, 303, 307 and 308) and ignores a rule it can't read. This site had a set of rules in August 2026 that used status 404, which Pages doesn't support, so it discarded every one for five days while the repository looked exactly as if they worked. After any change to redirects, load the old address yourself and see where it lands — the files can't tell you.

Who should stay on Squarespace or Wix

If you never want to touch your website again, stay where you are. A builder's monthly fee buys you someone else being responsible for the five jobs, and for many businesses that is worth more than the money saved. The same goes for a site that sells products: a shop's payments, stock and tax are a different build from a few pages and a contact form.

This way suits someone who will read every page before it goes live, who wants to own the files outright, and who is happy to check things after each change. If that isn't you now, it may be later, when the fees or the limits of the builder start to grate.

Quick answers

Getting your new website found on Google

A website nobody can find is a brochure in a drawer. The next step is getting found, and being on Google means four different things, from a free listing to paid ads: how to get your business on Google.