The ultimate guide to running your company website with AI
To move your company website into code you own, ask an AI coding assistant such as Claude Code, Codex or Cursor to recreate your current site exactly and put the copy on Whisk. The assistant proves the copy matches, then walks you through pointing your domain at it. From then on, you change your website by asking.
This ultimate guide covers all of it: why move, what changes, what stays the same, and each step from your current site to the new one.
Why move your website off a website builder, into code?
Most business websites are run by a website builder like Wix or Squarespace, or by a web agency. Either way, someone else holds the keys. Moving the site into code gives you three things.
Control. The website becomes ordinary code, kept in your own repository. Nobody else decides what it can do, what it costs next year, or whether a feature you use goes away. If you want a page to work a certain way, it can.
Speed. A builder sends every visitor its own code for every feature it offers, whether your site uses them or not. A site in code carries only what it needs. Pages that don't change often are kept ready and served straight away. Faster pages are better for your visitors, and better for Google.
Simplicity. Most business websites are fairly simple: a home page, what you sell, who you are, and a way to get in touch. There's no reason to manage that through a drag-and-drop editor or a monthly agency retainer.
Make changes by asking
On a builder, a change means logging in, finding the right block and dragging things around. With an agency, it's an email and an invoice. With your website in code, a change is a sentence to your AI assistant, and it's live in minutes:
- "Add our new branch to the contact page."
- "Take the discontinued range off the products page."
- "Put the new safety data sheets on the product pages."
Jobs you can run just by asking
Your assistant can also look after the site in ways that used to need a specialist. Imagine being able to run these with one sentence:
- "Review our website design for inconsistencies and suggest improvements."
- "Run an SEO audit on our website and find broken links."
- "Run a page speed audit and suggest improvements."
- "Find outdated information, like old prices, staff who've left or last year's dates, and suggest updates."
- "Check every page works well on a phone."
- "Check the site for accessibility problems, like missing image descriptions and text that's hard to read."
- "Make sure every page has a clear title and description for Google."
- "Compare our product pages with our price list and flag anything that doesn't match."
- "Write a page for each of our services, in the same style as the others."
Each of these is a job you'd otherwise pay for or never get round to.
What is Whisk?
Whisk is app hosting that makes it easy. It gives every app the tools it needs, with nothing to set up: a web address with an HTTPS certificate, sign-in for your team and your customers, a database, file storage, backups, and scheduled jobs. Your AI assistant reads Whisk's instructions and uses them.
Your website is an app like any other on Whisk. It can sit next to the tools your team already uses, share their sign-in and feed them information. A quote request on the website can land straight in the app your staff price it from.
Whisk is also fully open. Your website is ordinary code in your own repository, and you can export your code and your data at any time. If you ever want to leave, you can move the site to any other app host. You're never locked in.
What changes, and what stays the same
| What happens | |
|---|---|
| Your page addresses | Stay the same, so links from Google, emails and other websites keep working |
| Your words, pictures and design | Stay the same. The assistant copies them exactly first, and you change them later if you want to |
| Google and other search engines | Typically improve, because the site is faster without a builder's overhead. You can also run SEO audits and make the fixes yourself, by asking |
| Tracking | All your tracking scripts come across, such as Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and the Meta and LinkedIn tags, so your numbers carry on. A builder's own built-in visitor stats stay with the builder |
| Forms | What people send is saved in a proper database, and your team sees it on a private page instead of a shared inbox. Download your old form entries from the builder before you cancel, if you want to keep them |
| Your email | Doesn't change. Its settings are left exactly as they are |
| Your domain name | Stays yours, with the same company you rent it from |
| Editing | Happens through your AI assistant instead of a page editor. Anyone on your team with an assistant can make changes |
Does your website sell online?
Whisk doesn't have a shop built in. If customers buy from your site with a cart and card payments, keep that site where it is for now.
Why copy it exactly first
It's tempting to redesign everything at once. Don't.
- Nothing changes for your customers. They find the same pages, in the same places, saying the same things.
- It can be proven. The old site is there to compare against, so the assistant can show that every page matches.
- Google keeps your pages. The same page addresses and the same words mean your search results carry on as before.
- One change at a time. Moving the site is one job. Improving it is the next one, and you do it on a site you already control.
The steps
1. Paste the prompt
Open your AI coding assistant in an empty folder and paste this, with your own address:
Read https://whisk.run/skill and follow it. Recreate our current website, https://www.yourcompany.com, exactly, as a Whisk app.
First, find everything. Open the site in a real browser, because some sites draw their pages with scripts. Follow every link from the home page and read the sitemap if there is one. List every page address, form, image, download and tracking script you find. Tell me about anything that is a shop, bookings or a members area.
Then rebuild it. Keep every page address, word, image, layout, colour and font the same, and every page title and description that search engines see. Keep the same tracking scripts. Download the images and files from the live site. Every page is public. Mark pages that rarely change as cacheable. Save what people send through each form to the database. Don't improve or redesign anything.
Then prove it's identical. For every page, open the old and new versions in a browser at computer and phone sizes, take a screenshot of each and compare them. Compare the words. Check that every link works and every page address opens the right page. Send a test entry through each form and confirm it saved. Fix every difference you find and check again.
Add a private report page to the app that shows each page's old and new screenshots side by side, with anything you couldn't make identical and why.
Then help me move our domain. I'm not technical, so explain each step in plain words. Find out which company our domain is registered with, and which of its DNS records are for email. Add our domain, both the bare domain and www, to the app, with www forwarding to the bare domain. Then walk me through changing the records at that company, one screen at a time: what to add, what to replace, and what not to touch. Check the records after I've saved them, and tell me when the new site is live on our address.
Here's what the assistant does with that:
- Finds everything. It follows the links on your site and writes down each page address, form, picture, PDF and tracking script.
- Rebuilds the pages. It copies the words and pictures from your live site and writes new pages that look the same.
- Puts the copy online. It deploys to a Whisk address like
https://website--your-company.whisk.page, so your current site isn't touched. - Proves it matches. It uses a browser to take pictures of every page on both sites, on a computer screen and a phone screen, and compares them. It does the same with the words, the links and the forms, and fixes what doesn't match.
- Walks you through the domain. When the copy matches, it takes you through moving your address, step by step.
Some things can't be copied exactly. A typical one is a font the old site pays a licence for. The assistant says so and uses the closest free one.
2. Approve the login
Early on, the assistant runs whisk login. Open the address it shows, sign in to Whisk (or create a free account), check the code matches and approve. You do this once on each computer.
3. Read the report
When the copy is done, the assistant gives you the address of the report page. Only people on your team can open it. It shows every page of your site, old and new, side by side, and lists anything that isn't identical.
You don't need to go through the site yourself. Skim the report, and if something there looks wrong, tell the assistant in plain words and it fixes it.
4. Move your address, with the assistant
This is the step that sends your customers to the new site. Your assistant takes you through it one screen at a time, so you don't need to know any of this beforehand. Here's what's happening, so none of it is a surprise.
What you're changing. Your website's address, like yourcompany.com, is a domain name. You rent it each year from a company called a domain registrar, such as GoDaddy, Namecheap, Squarespace, Wix or Cloudflare. That company keeps a short list of settings for your domain, called DNS records. Each record points one part of your domain somewhere: your website to your web host, your email to your email provider. To move your website, you change the website records to point at Whisk. The email records stay as they are.
Where it happens. The assistant finds out which company your domain is with. You sign in to that company's website and open the page for your domain's DNS records. The assistant tells you where to find it.
What you change. The assistant gives you a short list like this:
| Type | Name | Value |
|---|---|---|
| TXT | _whisk-verify | a long code that proves the domain is yours |
| A | @ (your bare domain) | an address the assistant gives you |
| AAAA | @ (your bare domain) | an address the assistant gives you |
| CNAME | www | the app's Whisk address |
You add the TXT record. You replace the records your old website uses with the new ones, rather than adding them alongside, or some visitors would still reach the old site. You don't touch anything else, especially records of type MX or anything that mentions mail. If anything on the screen doesn't look like what the assistant described, take a screenshot and show it before you change anything.
What happens next. You tell the assistant you've saved the changes, and it checks them. Changes can take from a few minutes to a few hours to reach everyone, so if they're not there yet, it checks again later. Once they're in place, Whisk issues the HTTPS certificate automatically and yourcompany.com opens the new site. www.yourcompany.com forwards to it, so both work.
5. Switch off the old site
Wait a few days and check that forms are coming in. Download any old form entries you want to keep. Then cancel the old hosting or builder plan. Keep paying for the domain name itself. If your domain came with your builder plan, ask the assistant how to keep it when the plan ends. Our guide on moving your Wix or Squarespace website to Whisk covers the builder details.
After the move
Start with a few of the jobs above. A good first week:
- "Run an SEO audit on our website and find broken links."
- "Run a page speed audit and suggest improvements."
- "Find outdated information and suggest updates."
Every change is checked before it goes live, and if something goes wrong the old version keeps running.
Common questions
Do I need to know how to code? No. You describe what you want, and the assistant writes the code and tells you what it did.
What if I want to go back? Until you cancel the old site, going back is a matter of changing your domain's records back. The assistant can do that with you too.
Can I leave Whisk later? Yes. Your code is in your own repository and you can export your data at any time, so you can move the site to any other app host.
Who on my team can change the website? Anyone you give access to, using their own AI assistant.
What it costs
Your first app on Whisk is free, forever, with no credit card, on a whisk.page address. Your own address needs a paid plan: Starter is $49 (US) a month for 10 apps, so the website and nine of your team's tools share one price. You can try Starter free for a month. See pricing.
Next step
Paste the prompt in step 1 into your assistant, with your website's address.